God participation to heal, not scare or sicken
FAQ - What is this website about? A: Read the great Lizard
SERMONS & THOUGHTS
On saying: "I am God." +
The cosmic Christ
Non duality
Accept yourself
Life, in all its fullest
the Trinity, who cares?
INTO A LIFE WITHOUT A SECURITY BLANKET
Not just a private hobby for nutters
20 20 Vision
Star stuff not shop stuff
The happiest fish
A healthier death
THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD
KILL JESUS
Just Deserts
The I of God
Come again? Lord Jesus
Hard to follow, harder to refuse
Letters to the Cosmos
R.I.P DR. BOTTOM
Silly Signs
Forget Christianity, learn Christ
Feel my wrongteous anger
Barking mad and loving it, my dear St Dawkins
Watch out for that ditch!
Evolve or die
What's so good about Friday?
Open the blinds & heal your soul
Truth will not secure you tight
A complete idiot's guide to repentance
Imperfect and just divine
Attention!
May you live in interesting times
Christmas Forever
When the Son finally sets
Remembering Angels
Being believed in
One nation under CCTV
Calming of the waves
Apocalypse Now
The Republic of Reality
Unsaved Christians, saved unChristians
This hall of mirrors
God dies, God rises
Speak to reason
On giving birth to God
Sacred Stillness
I think not mate
I thirst for truth
You brood of vipers!
Be fully human
ESSAYS & ARTICLES
Transforming suffering
How God was made contemptible
To create evil - dwell on it
The Orthodox Christ
How the West was Lost
Christ and Plato - the Mystical Theology
On saying "I am God" +
Join me in a prayer of St Ephrem - Lord, shed upon our darkened souls the brilliant light of your wisdom so that we may be enlightened to serve you with renewed purity. As sunrise marks the hour for men to begin their toil, in our souls, prepare us for the day that will never end.
A clergy family once decided to let their three-year-old son record the message for their home answering machine, and the rehearsals went well: “Mummy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your name, phone number, and a brief message, they’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
Then came the test. Father pressed the record button and their son said slowly: “Mummy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your name, phone number, and a brief message, they’ll get back to you as soon as Jesus comes.”
Children, and we would all be children at heart, do the funniest things. My two year old over here apparently answered a doorbell ring by opening the door, looking at the two visitors silently, closing the door on them, and walking back into the lounge to say: “I don’t like them.”
But we children learn what we are taught. As very small children we even need to be told we are the reflection in the mirror, when at that point in life we still know very well, that the reflection in the mirror isn’t who we are at all, it is really just another thing in the world. Who here wasn’t once held and asked who is that in the mirror? Maybe we were right when we thought that reflection was just another thing in the world, not our own centre.
It is that centre we will now discover. Will you join me?
Look into a mirror. Do you see a public identity, the person, who is at a distance, a thing who is always a few feet’s distance away from you, the face others see, or the private being who sees from the centre, at zero distance.
Isn’t it a public identity, rather than who you are?
Now point at something in front of you – see how it has colour and shape. Move your finger slowly back towards you, past your legs and body, more colour and shape, until it points back at the one who is looking – do you see any colour or shape now? Do you see any thing at all? Or are you the invisible seer, spacious capacity, eternal soul, indefinable awareness, boundless, timeless being, at the centre of all?
Now touch your head, and for other people around you it looks like you are touching who you really are, but for you, isn’t it more like you are feeling some sensations in an unbounded space which is capacity for sensations?
Now point at yourself once again, look at your finger, and turn both from side to side. Does it look like you are moving, or does it look like you are staying still while the world, including your body and finger, is moving?
The point is this - I am still at the centre because I am the centre, and not a thing in the world at all. I am, because I am is the very name of God in the Bible.
Be like children and you enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus said. Perhaps he knew Children ask the best questions, like: “Why is there something, and not just nothing?” Childhood is too short for us to be the child we ought to, so we can also ask, if we still have any sense of wonder left at all: “Why is there something, not just nothing?” The answer is, of course - that is that it is a given world.
We didn’t invent it in a laboratory and we can’t buy it in a shop. It is a given, a present. There is both bad news and good news with this. The bad news is that there's nothing we can do to deserve it. And the good news is, well, there’s nothing we can do to deserve it. It is a gift.
I don’t know if you have ever seen the film City of Angels, but if not, I do recommend it to you. In the midst of the film, a cardiothoracic surgeon is holding a man’s heart in her hands, squeezing it, fighting for his life, but he dies and she starts to wonder who it is she is actually fighting. This in turn leads her to reflect on her medical training, and she says: “After all this time, and after all this work, I suddenly have the feeling that none of this is in my hands. And if it isn’t, what can I do with that?”
There’s nothing we can do with it, because it is a given, and we can chose to respond, that’s what responsibility means, ability to respond. We don’t have to be guilty for our birth or scared of our death, and the New Testament says we are not given a spirit of fear. By changing the way we see, we see that God is everywhere, and if not seen everywhere, then God is not seen anywhere.
The world - or Kosmos, and God - or Theos, and Man - or Anthropos, can't be seen separately. The cosmotheandric vision has no single centre. The centre is as wide as the circumference.
If we accept the source who is Love and consciousness, just as God became human in Jesus, we become divine. 2 PETER 1: 2-4 says this: "Grace and peace be yours in abundance, in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, whose divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. He has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that you may escape the corruption in the world and be participants of the divine nature."
In Philippians, Christ Jesus is described as emptying himself out and not regarding equality with God as a thing to be grasped. And Matthew’s gospel also says whoever exalts him or herself is humbled, and whoever humbles him or herself is exalted. The great Meister Eckhart added: “All God asks you most pressingly is to go out of yourself, and just let God be God in you. For God will only come in, when the creature goes out.”
This creature who was born, let us face it, must also die. But until we die daily, as St Paul says, by emptying ourselves out and opening mind, heart and hands, we see things not as they actually are, but as we think they are.
Like the story of an isolated village in which an old blacksmith, who finds a young lad willing to work very hard for low pay, so immediately the smith gives his instructions to his eager lad: "Now, when I take the metal out of the fire,” he says, “I'll lay it on the anvil; and when I nod my head hit it with the hammer." So the very next day, the lad is the only blacksmith left in the village.
As childhood is too short for us, the spirit of God soon gets filled with thoughts and the other five senses, and we react to our feelings and create complexes which we come to believe we actually are. Who are we fooling?
The recent Royal Institution Christmas lectures for children were all about the human brain. The lecturer addressed an assembled audience of children and said plainly and clearly that there was simply no-one in charge, no-one inside, sitting in an armchair in mission control, running it all like one of the Numbskulls in the Beano comic.
Human beings are not human thinkings anyway. No-one being in the brain is a divine mystery. It points to a secret Christians call the Kingdom of God. And we all know the best place to hide any secret is the last place anyone would ever want to look for it, in our own nothingness.
No one wants to hear about nothingness, because it’s too simple, and we creatures prefer to be clever. But with nothingness, there’s nothing to congratulate yourself for, no dressing it up, nothing to grasp. Christian dogma has the whole universe coming out of nothing, and so our own nothingness is not only full but gloriously Christian.
The Franciscan word is ‘poverty’, the Carmelite word is nada, nihil, Jesus spoke of the desert, a place we are voluntarily under stimulated, Matthew’s gospel advises us to go into our tamei’on to pray in secret, tamei’on means closet, a hidden storage space. So if we empty ourselves, then we stop living out of other people’s response to us, and this is the space where God is.
In the Bible God is called I am, and from this space, I am not who you think I am. And I am not who you need me to be either, because I’m not even who I need myself to be. I am not the reflection you see. I am nothing, and therefore in a good place to receive everything from God.
In Colossians Paul calls this “who you are, in Christ, hidden in God”. Our biggest temptation is to fill this nothing up with some thing, any thing, any image, just as long as we can own it and manage it. It is not for us to create God. St John says no-one has ever seen God, and there are no big men in the sky, but in our own absence there is an eternal Self bigger than our own imagination.
Grasping at God is like trying to make your own hair or your own nails grow, or ordering your thyroid gland to work, it can’t be done. Try it. It doesn’t work. We didn’t invent God, we can’t buy God, and unfortunately for sermon writers like me, our finest story of God is unspoken. Jesus says in Mark 4: “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, stories.”
So the Kingdom of God is in the heart or at the centre. Christian life is not about rules, but about attitudes cultivated by the divine spirit, and the fulfillment of this process is entry into eternal life, participation in the nature of eternal God. That is good news throughout the universe, the eternal Christ en-fleshed in Jesus, making it known to all created souls in ways we can’t imagine.
And when we gather as the Church, we form just one form of the Kingdom of God, the Republic of Ultimate Reality, the Realm of an unlimited uncreated potential. It is a very ambiguous form - because people, being creatures, rather than receiving nothing, have a strange anxiety they have to get involved in and captured by something, grasp at life, even Church life, which is a gift.
You may have seen a news report over Christmas showing Armenian and Orthodox priests in the Church of the Nativity fighting one another with their brooms, throwing brooms at each other, hitting one another around the head with brooms. It was like Father Ted, but it wasn’t a comedy. Can you imagine it happening now?
But it does happen. Animosity happens in the Church, and it was the same in Jesus’ day. Our gospel says he entered the synagogue and commanded unclean spirits to be silent. We might not talk about unclean spirits or gnashing teeth or outer darkness like he did, but psycho-somatic patterns, sub personalities, fear managers, identifying with the creations in the mirror, with pride, with thinking, with being something rather than just nothing, one uncreated spirit of God, who contains all.
Imagine we all live under a large board full of empty holes, with lights shining in from above, in and down through these holes. This is how we might think we are, all underneath God, as we look up through the holes, at the light coming down to us. But the holes are our souls, and the light is God, and once in our nothingness, we can actually go up through the hole, and then into God’s side.
You might think this is impossible for us, but it isn’t for God who is in us, the nothing in our something, the gift in what seems to be our very own life. So there is a much better form of the Kingdom of God, much less ambiguous than the Church, because it consists only of sincere commitment to the living spirit, who isn’t a thing.
To paraphrase the sermon on the mount, the better form of the Kingdom of God consists only of those sincerely committed in this living spirit, who are un-attached, who are not grieving what must pass, but who are seeking to comfort those who do grieve, rejoicing at another’s good fortune, not requiring deference, not being superior, but seeking justice for the oppressed, welfare for all, mercy for the weak, forgiveness for those who turn from evil, loving beauty and goodness, turning from mechanical hatred and violence, pursuing what builds up, and enduring real hardship and real hostility in order to witness to supreme loving kindness and selfless love.
God draws near to liberate us from estrangement and alienation, by growing here in Church, through to here, in the heart centre, through to a third and even better form of the Kingdom of God, which is not in this world at all. It is the communion of saints, and there is no evil.
But it must keep growing even further still, back into itself, the One, the Giver of all good gifts himself, the source of all life, who is our own source and the source of the whole cosmos, who must one day raise it all back to his eternal divine nature. The gospel calls this close of the age: “te sunteleia tou aionos” and Jesus is reported as saying: “I am, with you, until the end of the age”.
So who is God if not I am? One Rabbi called God the soul of your soul. The reason we can say “I am God” is not because we are insane or egotistical, but because we chose to be nothing at all. Not a thing. Nothing can take everything else in, but if we chose to be something instead, we just shut other things out.
This not being anything means that God’s love can be what it is - all embracing, and Christians are able to rejoice that we can see it expressed on this small planet in the person of Jesus and in the Church. But any attempt to confine it to either is self defeating, like little Jamie, who is trying to use God.
Jamie says to God, God, how long is a million years to you? God says, well Jamie, a million years to me is like one second. And how much is a million pounds to you God? So God says “Jamie, it is a mere penny.” So a million years is a second, and million pounds is a penny, so Jamie then thinks and says: “God, can I have one of your pennies?” - And God replies, “just one second.”
It’s a given world, and there’s absolutely nothing at all we can do to deserve it. The Priest and spiritual guide Anthony De Mello put it like this. We depend on one another for all kinds of things. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, which is interdependence! We set up society in this way, and it’s fine to allot different functions to different people for the welfare of all, so all can function better, live better, at least ideally, we hope.
But to depend on a person psychologically and emotionally is to depend on another for your happiness, and if you try that, whether you are aware of it or not, next you will be demanding that people contribute to your happiness. After that will come fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, and finally mutual control.
But perfect love casts out all this fear, and in the source, at your centre, there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I don’t demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you at all. If you were to leave, I would not feel sorry for myself. I may still enjoy your company immensely, and I do, but I don’t cling to it. As I enjoy your company it is on a non-clinging basis.
Because what I REALLY enjoy isn’t you OR me, but far greater than both you AND me. It is the centre, the Kingdom, it is something I discovered, it is a symphony, an orchestra, because it plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, it doesn't stop, it just plays another one. It is gift. A gift implies a giver, who does not depend on me at all, and who never ceases, but who, as no-thing, contains each and every single thing.
Join me in a prayer of St Ephrem. Lord, shed upon our darkened souls the brilliant light of your wisdom, so that we may be enlightened to serve you with renewed purity, and as sunrise marks the hour for men to begin their toil, in our souls, prepare us for the day that will never end.
In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit
Amen +
The cosmic Christ
One night, in a very expensive exclusive restaurant, so well attended it is fully booked a year in advance, a man is being refused a seat, but he feels far too important for this, so he shouts repeatedly at the maitre d in the lobby: “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am!”
And just then, the maitre d happens to spot a psychiatrist on his way out of the restaurant, so he turns and says: “Excuse me sir, but would you please tell this gentleman who he is?”
To answer the question, who am I, brings the fullest rest and joy, but how will it happen? Here it is a clue described by the character Edmund, in an otherwise very depressing play by Eugene O’Neill, called ‘Long day’s journey into night’.
“When I was on the squarehead, a square rigger bound for Buenos Aires, full moon in the trades, old hooker driving forth in knots, I lay on the bough stead facing the stern with the water foaming into spewm under me, the mast with every sail white in the moonlight towering high above me.
I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, I actually lost my life. I was set free, I dissolved. I became sea, became moonlight, and the ship and the high dim starred sky. I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy.
I belonged within something greater than my own life or the life of humans, to life itself, to God, if you want to put it that way, to the joy of belonging to the fulfilment beyond man’s lousy pitiful greed and fears and hopes and dreams.
And several other times, when I was swimming far out, or alone on the beach, I have had the same experience. I became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swinging in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude, like the veil of things as they seem, drawn back by an unseen hand.
For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning, then the hand lets the veil fall again, and you are alone, lost in the fog, as you stumble on again to nowhere for no good reason.”
The answer then is that to experience who he is, Edmund loses who he is not. This is also what St Paul means when he says I live, yet it is not I, but Christ lives in me. In Romans Paul calls this the death of the old man, and here it is once again, explained in Thomas Merton’s favourite story.
When Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were crossing Hao River by the dam, Chuang said: “See how free the fishes leap and dart. That is their happiness.”
As they walked, Hui replied: “Since you are not a fish, how do you KNOW what makes fishes happy?”
Chuang said: “Since you are not I, how can you possibly KNOW that I do not know what makes fishes happy.”
Hui argued: “But if I, not being you, cannot know what you know, it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know what THEY know.”
Chaung said: “OK, then let us get back to your original question. You asked me, HOW I know what makes fishes happy. From the terms of your question you know already THAT I know what makes fishes happy. The answer is that I know the joy of fishes in the river THROUGH MY OWN JOY, as I go walking along the same river.”
When it feels that you are not separate from others, that you know them through the same river, there is only this unity behind nature, the wisdom mind. As John’s gospel states: ‘In the beginning was the word,’ and this word, ‘word’ comes from a Greek word, ‘Logos’: the Logos which became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because the word Logos is translated into English as ‘word’, but it really means wisdom, the wisdom of God, because it signifies Christ, the word of God, who is not a book, just as a ring is more than a piece of metal, because it signifies a commitment, and a house is more than a pile of bricks, as it signifies a home.
The word Logos was coined by Heraclitus six centuries before Jesus, and it suggests the shared aliveness of eternal reason, a cosmic pattern, an expression of unity behind nature, the mind of the universe, a first principle, a unity hidden from view, which balances out all the opposites.
When the New Testament was translated from Greek to Chinese, the Logos was rendered as DAO. In the beginning was the Dao, it said, and the Dao dwelt among us. Lao Tzu was writing about Dao as Heraclitus was writing about Logos.
Lao Tzu taught a return via the way, to the golden age, when people were closer to heaven and nature, when man was in a pure state, just as our Judeo Christian creation myth teaches an original state of union with God rather than self-sufficient clinging and subsequent fear of separation, in life and death.
Immeasurable indeed were the ancients, said Lao Tzu, subtle, unfathomable and penetrating, in pristeen simplicity, rising above the desire for created things, like an uncarved block, like water, which unresistingly accepts the lowest level yet also manages to wear away the hardest substance.
In the same way, Thomas Merton said what sin is to the Christian, cosmic disorder or personal anxiety is to the Daoist.
A shared joy comes in contemplation, intuition, meditation, a seeing expressed in spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, spiral fingerprints on our hands holding them, and the spiral dna helix inside the flesh of those same hands.
This joy is a practice, but it was revealed to us from beyond our reach, in the flesh of a Palestinian Jew who said Love your neighbour as Being yourself.
All this talk of union between self and God is a paradox, like the Nicene Creed, which describes Jesus as both fully human and fully divine.
If it seems they can’t both be true at once, they can’t be resolved, then we still need to access the resolution through ourselves, a likeness between the seer and seen, so spirit and matter can coexist, a particular expression of the whole.
Jesus suggested this way of being was closed to those who claimed it. Jesus probably didn’t call himself Christ either, because Christ was not his last name.
It is the Greek translation of Messiah, a Hebrew term for anointed one, someone acknowledged as a leader approved of by God. But in the New Testament, Christ the Logos, the wisdom of God, means much more than a leader:
In John’s Gospel: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood.”
In Colossians: “In the Son all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
In Ephesians: “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”
In the first letter of John: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard what we have seen with our eyes, looked at and touched with our hands concerning the Word of Life, we have seen and testify and proclaim to you as eternal life. That which was with the Father and was manifested to us, we have seen and heard and we proclaim to you so that you too may have fellowship with us.
"Indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete. This is the message we have heard and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”
So if, as we have just heard, the whole universe existed in Christ, this can’t mean the whole universe existed in the human Jesus who grew up in Nazareth, walked around the fertile regions of Galilee and headed for Jerusalem.
What the whole universe existed in Christ means is that the whole universe existed in the wisdom mind whom Jesus embodied on this earth.
So it was Christ as spirit materialising in a Big Bang 14 billion years ago, it is Christ religions seek today, it will be Christ left when it all expires in a heat death.
Christians believe that when recorded history was ready, the cosmic Christ, the mind of this universe, became incarnate, so that it wasn’t just mathematical wisdom, but so, as love, we could fall in love with it, see it, and touch it, and as a result of its being embodied, intuit it in this world.
The bliss of contemplative Christianity is that pre-existent love, not a concept, not a book, not a system to relieve guilt, but the love which loves you first and loves you more, is in the world.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you are this beholder, so beauty is really you.
None of this requires the euphemistic justice of a death of Jesus, which was really a miscarriage of justice, and much of atheism is a valid rejection of a sick view of God.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians, said that no-one needed to die, it was just an appropriate way of showing what God suffers in redeeming the world. Jesus died saying forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.
What it does require is the birth of Christ, because Christianity is the good tidings into a world saved before creation. It is a blissful birth, not a violent death. A saved world before the creation through a virgin birth which floods the world with liberating gnosis, or self-knowledge, like Edmund’s knowledge on that square rigger under the moonlight, so that each moment is a confrontation with the cosmic heart.
But what is our over analytical and reductionist modern mind to make of this virgin birth? Modern cloning techniques suggest a man’s sperm is not required for a birth to happen anyway, so it really shouldn’t be too problematic. But that’s not the point.
Christ’s virgin birth was more than just unusual, it was actually a political statement. Alexander the Great’s birth had been attributed to a virgin, and the Roman Emperor Augustus’ birth was attributed to a virgin, so acknowledging Christ’s birth as a virgin birth was pledging one’s allegiance to a wholly different leader, not a time bound empire builder with a will to impose and the military means to do it, but someone eternal, someone non violent, someone existing in this world in such a way as to appear other-worldly, like Lao Tzu’s water, accepting the lowest level, but still wearing away the hardest substance.
Nor was this the birth of a non-violent mystery teacher like Buddha, who taught the dissolution of the self as the end of psychological suffering.
What purpose, Buddha had asked, is served in identifying with a fleeting, flickering, flux like body mind, its changing thoughts, its ephemeral sensations and emotions, clinging to I, me, mine.
Socrates had also said, “the unaware life is not worth living”.
And as someone else said more recently: “I would like to look at the mountain for what it is, and not just as a comment on my life.” Jesus would agree with this, in his parables and teachings, and that the Kingdom of God is within, but Jesus is more.
So let’s draw some conclusions.
If Jesus says you are the light of the world, and the first letter of John says that in God there is no darkness, who does that make you?
If Buddha’s birth was the birth of a wisdom teacher, Christ’s birth was the birth of the wisdom itself. St Irenaeus Bishop of Lyons put it well in 202 AD: “In his infinite love God became man, so that man could become God.”
Jesus will return, but possibly not literally, all wet and damp and aquaplaning in at 33 miles per hour through a cloud, maybe a nuclear mushroom cloud somewhere over the Red Sea.
There will be an end of history, but isn’t that always the case when eternity enters time?
Spirit filled poets, seers, visionaries, apocalyptic dreamers and God-inspired prophets all rise from the present moment. Now you are the space in which God is at work. Now time disappears, and a favourite Eastern Orthodox saying is that a person whose mind is full of thoughts is far from Jesus.
In the 2nd century, Ptolemy wrote: “Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars, my feet no longer touch the earth”.
Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe is long gone, now we theorise multi verses, now we know of a thousand million stars in a thousand million galaxies, and time may not end until they have all run their course, with any undiscovered life forms they may hold.
Human life is bewildering, but in a positive sense. If we put one fingernail up against the night sky, behind this tiny little space which our one tiny little fingernail obscures, there are one million galaxies hidden.
Studying the healthiest people he could find, to see what they all had in common, the psychologist Abraham Maslow concluded the most humane people have all had mystic experiences.
These experiences imply a loss of control, rather than a firm grip. And there is a reason for this. What we grasp is knowledge, but what grasps us is wisdom. The wisdom of God. Not the sick God atheism is allergic to, but Love, and not our love, just Love.
An existential ‘yes’ to belonging to wisdom, whether we like to or whether not. We do need an ego to relate to one another, but we don’t need to identify with one. Wisdom can play with the ego in silence, and enter down into the abyss of God. It is not fearful. ‘Fear not’ is the most common Biblical command, and the angels are always saying it.
At night, our eyes are 100,000 times more sensitive to light, and every second, not even as long as it takes to breathe in once, as many blood cells will die and be born in our bodies as London has inhabitants.
Your blood vessels, if lined end to end, would reach around the world, but your heart needs only 60 seconds to pump all your blood through the network and back, because it beats 100,000 times a day, and still you have no control over it.
Nor do you give instructions to the 35 million digestive glands in your stomach to digest even one strawberry. Frankly, you may as well be absent.
Except that as well as absence there is the Logos, a liberating presence, which the New Testament calls the parousia, the making present of Christ.
This cosmic Christ, who can never become the private property of any Church, any person, any company or human society, is more than any of us can imagine. He embraces within His universal body saints and sinners.
All separation from Him shall be removed when the world is absorbed into Him again, inevitably, irresistably.
So to answer our original question, who am I, we are not little waves of material and psychological expressions, but we are the ocean who expresses them, in whom they are expressed, the cosmic Christ, still at large, still elusive, still utterly accessible, and still dangerous to each and every anthropocentric religious system, in this conscious and sacramental universe.
Psalm 39 says everyone’s life is but a breath, so we breathe, and God is breathing in us.
In Christ, we become who we are.
NON DUALITY
with thanks to Fr Richard Rohr
So what is non duality? Non duality means the lived experience of seeing whole, of seeing that you and the universe are one. It is an inner gesture by which we entrust ourselves totally and unconditionally to life, perceived as our own life but also as greater than ourselves.
Non duality is a feeling of belonging to the universe rather than a feeling of alienation from it. In Genesis, this is by eating from the tree of life, holism, and not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dualism, by splitting up experience and then rejecting of part of it.
As soon as we decide God is here, but not there, religion is dead. As medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said: “God enjoys himself … His own inner enjoyment is such that it includes his enjoyment of all creatures not as creatures, but as God.”
Jesus also expresses non duality. “My Father’s sun shines on the good and the bad; his rain falls on the just and the unjust.” “Let the weeds and the wheat grow together” “If thine eye is single, thy whole body will be filled with light” or “Nor should people say here it is or there it is, because the Kingdom of God is within you,” or “Whoever follows me must die to himself.”
We might well ask how can a person can follow anyone or anything after dying to his or herself, but Jesus is a model for our transformation. Jesus is the first Western religious teacher of the experience of non duality. In non duality, of course, there is no such thing as the West anyway, which is why Socrates said he was a citizen of the world. But at least in the region Jesus lived and died, he was the first religious teacher of non duality, though there were non dual philosophers.
Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew’s gospel is also non dual. It is to pay attention to the limitations of words and ideas, to pass through silence like a merchant who sells every other thing he has, for the one pearl. The disciple is one with life, even in suffering and evil, which is possibly why Jesus taught non-violence.
There isn’t one early church Father who interprets Jesus as advocating anything but strict non-violence, and there are lots of stories of Christians being persecuted because they refused to serve in the Roman army. We are not here to condemn military service, or belittle the sacrifice of soldiers, that would be more duality. But non duality and non violence do go together in Jesus’ teaching, and listening to it from the point of view of the later just war tradition only seems radical, because it goes back to the non dual roots of peace.
“Love your enemies. Pray for those whose persecute you, so you may be children of your Father who makes his sun rise on evil and good.”
“Offer the wicked man no resistance. If you only love those who love you, what good is that?”
“Do not fear those who can kill the body, but only those who can kill the soul.”
And “Why do you call me ‘Lord Lord’ when you don’t do as I say?”
It is hard to live this, but after Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the empire in 313 AD, it became almost impossible. Before that soldiers were refused baptism, and after it, only the baptised could be soldiers! It is very hard to see the non-duality of the sermon on the mount through an imperialistic lens. So when the Roman empire legitimised Jesus, St Anthony and the desert fathers and mothers fled into Palestine and Egypt to try to hold onto his teaching.
Anthony also displayed non duality. He said: “One who knows oneself, knows God,” and to this day Orthodox Christianity talks about theosis and deification, the process of our becoming God.
Anthony said this: “Understand that, be it the holy heavens or angels or archangels or thrones or dominions or cherubim or seraphim or sun or moon or stars, or patriarchs or prophets or apostles, or devil or satan or evil spirits or powers of the air, or man or woman, in the beginning of their creation, they all derived from One.”
And echoing St Paul he said this: “The Holy Spirit brings us back to our beginning, to recover our inheritance. There is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free.”
And this: “Wherever you go, have God ever before your eyes.”
Anthony’s followers, Abba Doulas and Abba Macarius said this: “One day when we were walking beside the sea I was thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, "Father, I am very thirsty." He prayed and said to me, "Drink some of the sea water." The water proved sweet, and I poured some into a leather bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man asked me why I was taking some. I said to him, "Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on." The old man said, "No need. God is here, God is everywhere." The lesson again is not that sea water is sweet, but that non duality and trusting God means living in the now.
Abba Macarius was once asked, “How should one pray?” The old man said 'There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one's hands and say, "Lord, as you will, and as you know."
This type of prayer was systematically taught in the monasteries of Europe, as contemplation. Contemplation literally means doing a higher measure – it is realizing one is not one’s thoughts and sensations, body, our name and possessions, but that they are all in one, and we must not try to possess them but, let them all pass through us. Teresa of Avila said it like this: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing, God alone is sufficient,” and John of the Cross emphasised “Nada” or nothingness. For the Contemplative, God is not a thing, a mere object, God contains every thing, every object, every world, and to be possessive of these things is worse than death. St Benedict said to really live you had to face death each and every day.
There were three stages in this monastic teaching of Contemplation: Firstly, disidentifying with one’s obsessive thoughts and compulsive feelings, or Purgation. Most of us were in this stage.
Secondly, seeing your mixed motives and the mixed motives of all the structures you are a part of, or illumination. Some people were in this stage.
And finally, the union of one’s soul with God, or unification – which brings with it life in the One - relationality, vulnerability, intimacy, forgiveness and self acceptance. There is only one at this stage. For the mystic, there is no duality between creator and creation. The whole universe is an expression of this divine life.
But all this was lost with the strong resurgence of dualism at the Reformation. To define your institution, either Protestant or Catholic, and exclude the other from it, you have to prove you are right, and establish opposition. This is classic duality, and it leads church to become about belonging rather than transforming.
Fast forward to the 1950’s and 60’s and enter Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk, who said that the West no longer even understood its own tradition. “You are not contemplatives,” he said, “you are just introverts”. Thomas Merton’s classic book is: “New Seeds of Contemplation,” and his classic statement on the experience of non duality is that: “God is not someone else.” This isn’t bringing God down to our level, but it is living without separation from the infinite, the eternal.
In our own everyday experience, we divide the present into a memory and an imagination, so that we are never here, where eternity is. Thomas Merton said that modern people are always telling themselves the time, as though the time would cease to exist if they stopped talking about it, which in fact, it would.
Jesus said: “My yoke is gentle and my burden is light” – and the word yoke is from the same root as the word yoga – which means one, or unity, or non duality.
So may the breath of life stay with you and may the sacrament of the present moment stay with you, and may the peace of God which passes all understanding fill your heart and mind with the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the blessing of God almighty, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with us now and remain upon us always.
Amen +
So what is non duality? Non duality means the lived experience of seeing whole, of seeing that you and the universe are one. It is an inner gesture by which we entrust ourselves totally and unconditionally to life, perceived as our own life but also as greater than ourselves.
Non duality is a feeling of belonging to the universe rather than a feeling of alienation from it. In Genesis, this is by eating from the tree of life, holism, and not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dualism, by splitting up experience and then rejecting of part of it.
As soon as we decide God is here, but not there, religion is dead. As medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said: “God enjoys himself … His own inner enjoyment is such that it includes his enjoyment of all creatures not as creatures, but as God.”
Jesus also expresses non duality. “My Father’s sun shines on the good and the bad; his rain falls on the just and the unjust.” “Let the weeds and the wheat grow together” “If thine eye is single, thy whole body will be filled with light” or “Nor should people say here it is or there it is, because the Kingdom of God is within you,” or “Whoever follows me must die to himself.”
We might well ask how can a person can follow anyone or anything after dying to his or herself, but Jesus is a model for our transformation. Jesus is the first Western religious teacher of the experience of non duality. In non duality, of course, there is no such thing as the West anyway, which is why Socrates said he was a citizen of the world. But at least in the region Jesus lived and died, he was the first religious teacher of non duality, though there were non dual philosophers.
Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew’s gospel is also non dual. It is to pay attention to the limitations of words and ideas, to pass through silence like a merchant who sells every other thing he has, for the one pearl. The disciple is one with life, even in suffering and evil, which is possibly why Jesus taught non-violence.
There isn’t one early church Father who interprets Jesus as advocating anything but strict non-violence, and there are lots of stories of Christians being persecuted because they refused to serve in the Roman army. We are not here to condemn military service, or belittle the sacrifice of soldiers, that would be more duality. But non duality and non violence do go together in Jesus’ teaching, and listening to it from the point of view of the later just war tradition only seems radical, because it goes back to the non dual roots of peace.
“Love your enemies. Pray for those whose persecute you, so you may be children of your Father who makes his sun rise on evil and good.”
“Offer the wicked man no resistance. If you only love those who love you, what good is that?”
“Do not fear those who can kill the body, but only those who can kill the soul.”
And “Why do you call me ‘Lord Lord’ when you don’t do as I say?”
It is hard to live this, but after Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the empire in 313 AD, it became almost impossible. Before that soldiers were refused baptism, and after it, only the baptised could be soldiers! It is very hard to see the non-duality of the sermon on the mount through an imperialistic lens. So when the Roman empire legitimised Jesus, St Anthony and the desert fathers and mothers fled into Palestine and Egypt to try to hold onto his teaching.
Anthony also displayed non duality. He said: “One who knows oneself, knows God,” and to this day Orthodox Christianity talks about theosis and deification, the process of our becoming God.
Anthony said this: “Understand that, be it the holy heavens or angels or archangels or thrones or dominions or cherubim or seraphim or sun or moon or stars, or patriarchs or prophets or apostles, or devil or satan or evil spirits or powers of the air, or man or woman, in the beginning of their creation, they all derived from One.”
And echoing St Paul he said this: “The Holy Spirit brings us back to our beginning, to recover our inheritance. There is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free.”
And this: “Wherever you go, have God ever before your eyes.”
Anthony’s followers, Abba Doulas and Abba Macarius said this: “One day when we were walking beside the sea I was thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, "Father, I am very thirsty." He prayed and said to me, "Drink some of the sea water." The water proved sweet, and I poured some into a leather bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man asked me why I was taking some. I said to him, "Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on." The old man said, "No need. God is here, God is everywhere." The lesson again is not that sea water is sweet, but that non duality and trusting God means living in the now.
Abba Macarius was once asked, “How should one pray?” The old man said 'There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one's hands and say, "Lord, as you will, and as you know."
This type of prayer was systematically taught in the monasteries of Europe, as contemplation. Contemplation literally means doing a higher measure – it is realizing one is not one’s thoughts and sensations, body, our name and possessions, but that they are all in one, and we must not try to possess them but, let them all pass through us. Teresa of Avila said it like this: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing, God alone is sufficient,” and John of the Cross emphasised “Nada” or nothingness. For the Contemplative, God is not a thing, a mere object, God contains every thing, every object, every world, and to be possessive of these things is worse than death. St Benedict said to really live you had to face death each and every day.
There were three stages in this monastic teaching of Contemplation: Firstly, disidentifying with one’s obsessive thoughts and compulsive feelings, or Purgation. Most of us were in this stage.
Secondly, seeing your mixed motives and the mixed motives of all the structures you are a part of, or illumination. Some people were in this stage.
And finally, the union of one’s soul with God, or unification – which brings with it life in the One - relationality, vulnerability, intimacy, forgiveness and self acceptance. There is only one at this stage. For the mystic, there is no duality between creator and creation. The whole universe is an expression of this divine life.
But all this was lost with the strong resurgence of dualism at the Reformation. To define your institution, either Protestant or Catholic, and exclude the other from it, you have to prove you are right, and establish opposition. This is classic duality, and it leads church to become about belonging rather than transforming.
Fast forward to the 1950’s and 60’s and enter Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk, who said that the West no longer even understood its own tradition. “You are not contemplatives,” he said, “you are just introverts”. Thomas Merton’s classic book is: “New Seeds of Contemplation,” and his classic statement on the experience of non duality is that: “God is not someone else.” This isn’t bringing God down to our level, but it is living without separation from the infinite, the eternal.
In our own everyday experience, we divide the present into a memory and an imagination, so that we are never here, where eternity is. Thomas Merton said that modern people are always telling themselves the time, as though the time would cease to exist if they stopped talking about it, which in fact, it would.
Jesus said: “My yoke is gentle and my burden is light” – and the word yoke is from the same root as the word yoga – which means one, or unity, or non duality.
So may the breath of life stay with you and may the sacrament of the present moment stay with you, and may the peace of God which passes all understanding fill your heart and mind with the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the blessing of God almighty, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with us now and remain upon us always.
Amen +
Accept yourself
There’s a story about a parachutist who bails out of a plane and lands in a tree. He hangs there until he spots a passerby, who says: “How did you get up there?” ‘I fell from the sky’ he replies, ‘but where am I?’ “In a tree.” says the passer by. ‘You must be clergy,’ sighs the parachutist. “How did you know?” the passer by asks. “Because clergy always tell me something completely true but utterly useless.”
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t only tell us something true, something which has been around as long as the recession or Cliff Richard, but something which is useful. “Scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat ... do whatever they teach you, but don’t do as they do!” In other words, do the practice.
There’s another story about the devil going for a walk with a friend when they see a man stoop and pick something up. “What did that man just find?” asked the friend. “A piece of truth,” said the devil. “Doesn't that disturb you?” asked the friend. “No,” said the devil. “I’ll let him make a belief out of it.”
There is nothing wrong with belief, unless the belief is small enough to stop you practicing it. So Jesus’ teaching about prayer in Matthew’s gospel warns against external religion, which feeds ego, reputation, fame, concern for the world’s perceptions. “They do their deeds to be seen by others,” he says, with broad phylacteries, those little tie on boxes with scripture in, with long fringes on their prayer shawls, with places of honour at banquets, the best seats in a synagogue, or for respect in the market place, and the desire to be called a Rabbi.
Jesus is also called Rabbouni, or teacher, more than by any other name in the gospels, but he doesn’t start the Lord’s prayer off with “Our Jesus”. His desire is not to talk about himself, but about the life and teaching he embodies, and which we can embody. Call no one your father on earth, he says, you have one Father in heaven. Nor are we to be called instructors, we have one instructor, one Messiah, one true Self, to whom we can say: “Not my will, but yours, or Thy will be done”
The practice is saying a wholehearted yes, accepting what is, not setting up a rival to God which prevents us from being fully alive, which means to be able to say: “For all that has been, thanks, and for all that shall be, yes.” It is as shocking as it is simple. God’s only rival is anything or anyone who weakens the attitude of yes and thanks, which is a gratefulness that makes us happy.
The prayer practice Jesus recommends is to notice we are a mystery to our temporary selves, and all who exalt themselves will be humbled, all who humble themselves will be exalted. We are not our thoughts, beliefs, sensations, bodies. God is the I am of the disciple, as well as the I am of Moses, but the kingdom of God is so difficult to define, Jesus has to use images and parables, like a man who stumbles across treasure in field by accident, then buries it in his sheer joy so he can go and sell everything else to buy the field which contains it, the field of his boundary-less awareness, and have it joyously contained in an ordinary life.
Anyone who wants to find God must also understand the limitations of words and ideas, must look, listen, hear without preconceived images, ideas, or reactions, read scripture meditatively, pass through silence, like suddenly walking into a fullness of being, a moment of joy and enlightenment, so the disciple’s prayer is to give up everything to acquire who he or she really is, like a merchant who sells everything he has, the disciple becomes poor in spirit, not deficient, but un-possessive, to buy one fine pearl of unconditional happiness, even in suffering and evil. He or she doesn’t try to hold anything else, any experience, person, status, he or she accepts, in a free generous open way, so that he or she is one with life, risen life.
As we give up our time bound definitions of who we are, body, clothes, relatives, possessions, and even our reason, we give up something good for something greater, give our full attention to what contains them all, to what really is. We let go of thoughts and live as the One source of all thoughts, images, sensations and daydreams, the One God. We go to the very earliest intuitions humanity has had about what is behind the senses and the mind.
Coming back to today, we are now seeing the effects of not accepting what is, but insisting we need something else, or as a former Bishop put it, encouraging people to borrow money they can’t afford, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like… people are demonstrating against financial mismanagement and government cutbacks across the world, and a vested interest in ensuring that things are loved and people are used, rather than the other way around.
There’s a story about a woman who is given three requests by God, who is weary of her. She asks for her husband to disappear so she can have a better one. But then she remembers his virtues and asks for him to be brought back again. With one request left she can’t decide what to ask for. What good is immortality without health? What good is health without money? What good is money without friends? So she asks God – what is your will - what should I ask for. God says “ask to be content no matter what you receive.”
St Paul says something very similar in his letter to the Philippians. I have learned the secret of being content, he says, in any and every situation. In Christ, he is no longer at the mercy of growth and decay, success and failure, honour and disgrace, poverty and riches, life and death. Thy will be done.
This is Jesus’ prayer – he is saying prayer is about interiority. We don’t need to use lots of words, he says, because our Father knows what we need before we ask. If he knows… he knows. This gives us trust to be still, to pay attention, just as God is paying attention. Just attention. Jesus advises us not to be unduly concerned about anything else - physical needs and consumer madness, but to look to beauty in the world, flowers and birds, to contemplate.
Set our mind on God’s Kingdom, so everything else will follow. Prayer in Matthew’s gospel is about being mindful, receiving the present, and not worrying about tomorrow. It is moving beyond words into a trusting loving intention which is in us, and more than this which actually is us.
Learning to practice is the same as learning to be. Distraction is unhappiness, and the cure is to pay attention. To give yourself to the moment, and to let go of the hundred thousand things contained within it. They are arising and passing within you. You, like God, contain them, so… accept yourself.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit +
Life, in all its fullest
Would you like to hear some children’s prayers?
Dear God, maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother.
Dear God, I bet it is hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it.
Dear God, if you watch in church on Sunday I will show you my new shoes.
Dear God, I found out how babies are made. It doesn’t sound right to me.
Finally, and remember this one, Dear God, instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?
It is easy to mock the three-tier universe and the other now legendary anachronisms of the Christian tradition as childish, but this last prayer is not childish, because death throws everything we think we know into question. It makes us all children.
So don’t ever let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow for resurrection. Our best physical theories about the cosmos suggest a profound connection between a nothingness from which we originate and an infinity in which we are engulfed.
And when someone dies, they seem to become nothing. But what is no-thing?
Modern physics shows us that nothingness is in fact a seething mass of virtual particles, all appearing and disappearing trillions of times in the blink of an eye.
Using lasers in a vacuum chamber, science shows us that electrons within atoms are wobbled about by a deep and mysterious energy filling every single apparently empty space in the entire universe.
To put it another way, creation is full of God’s essence, as energy, and this is in fact just how the Orthodox Church does put it.
It isn’t just that the study of the physical world at its smallest levels can mathematically and scientifically predict these fluctuations in such a way that they exactly match the measurements in a vacuum chamber, but that a fluctuation within nothing can actually cause a universe full of matter.
And since God is not a thing, the light released after the Big Bang shows us how this nothing seems to have the most incredible potential.
So I repeat, even though it is easy to mock literal interpretations of much of the Bible and Church tradition, don’t let anyone tell you that the physical world does not allow resurrection. On the contrary, tell them how it does, since as far as our physics can tell, the physical world is actually spiritual.
The world allowed resurrection two thousand years ago, and it still does. New life still comes out from despair and destruction, whatever that is, for you. Resurrection, here-and-now, and not only for this life.
As St Paul says, if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
What do I mean? Well, for example, in her book, On Life After Death, which you can still buy, the pioneer in the field of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, shares a provocative personal experience about her meeting Mrs. Schwarz, a woman she worked with who had died ten months earlier. At the time, she, Elizabeth, was about to give up her work. She was exasperated.
And she says this: “A woman walked straight toward me and said, ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back. Do you mind if I walk you to your office? It will only take two minutes.’ But this was the longest walk of my life. I am a psychiatrist. I work with schizophrenia. When patients would have hallucinations, I would tell them, ‘I know you see that Madonna on the wall, but I don’t see it.’ So I said to myself, ‘Elisabeth, I know you see this woman, but that can’t be.’
"And all the way to my office I did reality testing on myself, and when we reached my door, she opened it with this incredible kindness and tenderness and love, and said: ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back, to thank you, and because you cannot stop this work on death and dying, not yet.’ I looked at her, and I don’t know if I thought by then, it could be Mrs. Schwarz. I mean, this woman had been buried for ten months, and I didn’t believe in all that stuff.
"But I finally got to my desk. I touched everything that was real. I touched my pen, my desk, my chair. I was hoping that she would disappear. But she didn’t. Then the scientist in me won, and I said something very shrewd. ‘Reverend Gaines would just love to have a note from you. Would you mind?’ And this woman, knowing every thought I had, and I knew it, took the paper and wrote a note.
"Then she got up, and ready to leave, repeated, ‘Dr. Ross, you promise,’ implying don’t give up the work. So I said, ‘I promise.’ And at that moment, she disappeared.”
Don’t let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.
You may not personally have seen it yet, but as the gospel says, blessed are those who have not, and yet have come to believe.
Blessed, because a life lived in the hope, the trust, the intuition, the knowledge, or yes, even the experience, that death is not the end of life, is life lived closer to perfection.
The Bible says that through believing in Jesus you may have life in his name, but what does this actually mean?
It means to believe in the life which he represents.
The life of your true Self, not your ego.
That life which is both before and after you.
Your real life.
Spiritual life.
Matter is in life, not the other way around.
Which is it to be then?
St Paul says if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.
And what does that ‘in Christ’ really mean?
‘Learn Christ’ says the letter to the Ephesians.
Not ‘learn Christianity.’
The first chapter of Colossians and Ephesians says that the whole universe is in Christ. It doesn’t mean the whole universe was in Jesus, the man who walked Nazareth, but in the cosmic mind principle he embodied, and we can too.
Because as St Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians: The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised 'pneumatikon soma', a spiritual body.
So do not let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.
Physical death, whenever and however it happens in a life, as an emotional psychological death, or as full brain death, throws everything we think we know into question.
It makes us all children.
But that’s OK.
The remarkable thing about children is their very deep trust in life. Let this be your trust.
Not a 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but I actually prayed for a puppy', but a thank God, thank God for life in all its fullest.
The life which was in Jesus, and which still is.
In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen+
the Trinity - who cares?
Once upon a time a dandelion came to be growing in a meadow. The dandelion whispered to the amino acids and all the other nutrients in the soil:
“You need only to allow yourselves to be dissolved in a drop of water and I will suck you up through my roots. You won’t feel a thing. But afterwards, you will be able to grow and to flower and to fly away in the wind as a thousand miniature parachutes carrying seed.”
“OK,” said the amino acids and other nutrients. They let themselves be dissolved in rainwater, and sucked up through the roots, and they became, dandelion.
The next morning a rabbit came hopping along the meadow.
“Good Morning!” the rabbit said to the dandelion. “How would you like to become rabbit? You will have to allow yourself to become nibbled and swallowed. It hurts a little, but afterwards you will be able to jump and bounce and romp in the moonlight, wiggle your ears, and have lots of baby rabbits.”
The dandelion was not overly enthusiastic, but the idea of hopping around sounded like a lot more fun than just being stuck, in one place. “Okay,” said the dandelion with a sigh, and allowed itself to be munched and become a rabbit.
Toward evening, a hunter came by. “Good Evening!” said the hunter to the rabbit (for he was an unusually polite hunter). “How would you like to become human? You must allow yourself to be chased, shot dead, skinned, cooked in a stew, and eaten. This is not pleasant, I admit, but afterward you will be able to play yoyo, sing in the shower, and fly in a jet plane.”
The rabbit was scared, but flying in jet plane seemed so exciting that the idea was irresistible. So sniffing a little and wiping away a tear, the rabbit mumbled “OK,” went through with that ordeal, and became human.
The next morning the human became aware of a unifying presence, just beyond any personal reach. The human was so intrigued at what this could really mean, that he listened.
Until, that is, a voice said this: “Tell me, how would you like to become God?”
God? If you don’t sign up to that word, just for now, let’s stick to the word life. The point is that life is Being in communion, and life is all a relationship. To experience the fullest life means we are more than just genes and psychological patterns. We are aware of life, not just our model of life.
The scientific model suggests 14 billion years ago nothing exploded into something, and this nothing exploded into all of us, we who breathe the same air the trees breathe out, who are made of the same matter as the stars.
We are all part of one dynamic, unified system, and the word universe actually means One changing, and so, this seemingly separate life is actually interconnected. Difference is not separation, and we are in this together, like it or not, members of one another, as St Paul said.
But the way life is re-presented today, we’d be forgiven for completely forgetting this fact. Because at a fundamental level we believe we are separate, which feeds our guilt, our fear, our pride, our maladaptive coping, our anger, our suffering and our violence.
On an ecological level we destroy the earth, on an international level we destroy each other, and on an individual level we distract ourselves with an illusion of entertainment and control, and by never contemplating our own death. Beauty is replaced by glamour.
Our celebrity filled television is all about my body, my house or my garden, as if the limit of what we can do stops in the mirror or at the garden fence. We are inwardly divided, because we are educated as individuals, bundles of patterns deployed by a controlling independent ego, opposed to other controlling independent egos, each autonomous consumers, reduced to what we can measure, aspiring to be the sum total of purchases and lifestyle choices, in the technological bondage of a closed human conceptual system. Fake life. Alienation. To use and older word, sin.
And so true religion always calls us back, reminds us that being a person is being a part of one whole. Life is more than genes and psychological patterns, and the religious model of Unity in Trinity matters because three in One indicates life is beyond us, within us, and between us, and each aspect of this is One.
As Ephesians says, with wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth, under Christ.
By entering Christianity, we don’t have to leave humanity behind. John’s prologue says “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The beginning is the Big bang, and the wisdom of God, which is the cosmic mind principle Jesus embodied, we humans can also embody.
One Lord and Father of all, who is above all, through all, and in all, saving us from egocentricity, reminding us we all have one mutual source, one true Self, one dynamic dance in the creatures. Such is the intimacy between the Father beyond, the Son within and the Spirit between, that they not only embrace each other, but they also enter into each other, permeate each other, and dwell within each other.
We are not ancient Greeks, we are not ancient Romans, we are not even ancients. But even here in the 21st century, the compound Unity of the Trinity means relationship is at the centre of all life, and complete mutual love and knowledge, not just dry mathematics, are infinitely shared. Nor is this ancient theology.
There is a relationship of being, a mutual indwelling, or to use the Greek term, a perichoresis. Since there is a lot of fake life, life taken far too personally, let’s remember that the word persona literally means mask. Getting behind this mask is intrinsic to becoming unsuperficial, authentic, and to knowing who you are.
Which is why St Francis of Assisi once said this: you are looking for what is looking. In other words, the One is knowing itself in you, or as another Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart said, the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me. Or to get a bit closer to the Bible, as Jesus is reported to say in St John’s gospel: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they be one in us.”
On the face of it, we are all different, but we are each midwives to One grace, because differentiation is not really separation. This is why Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, painted in 1410, shows Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as androgynous, heads bowed, deferring to one another. There’s a space for you to sit, be welcomed, join the dance of eternal life.
Which is all very poetic, but why did the Trinity ever appear as dogma at all?
Because, from a human standpoint, which is possibly why it took a few centuries to formulate it, there was a real problem about saying Jesus of Nazareth was especially divine, that God was directly present in him, without compromising that precious Jewish belief that God is One.
So the answer people arrived at acknowledged that God continued to govern from Heaven, the Spirit communicated him, while Jesus revealed him in person. Problem solved. God could remain One being, or Homo-ousious to use the language of the day, but in three persons, as co-eternal, ie. none of them came first. Father Son and Holy Spirit, one Being in three persons, became the Christian idea of God. Well, give or take the odd clause, which we will come to.
You don’t find this in the Bible, but there are pointers. John’s gospel says the spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove to confirm him as the Son of God. And the letter to the Romans says this Spirit, which was to embolden the disciples and enable healing, witnessing and speaking in other languages, could enable us.
“When we cry “Abba! Father!” it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs, and if heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
But Christ is not some deadening certainty. Christ is a path we walk, a practice, an orthopraxy, with the Spirit’s company, to be lead into One Father. This is not uniformity, but unity in diversity, so it co-operates.
Of course it is a paradox. How can one really be three? And St Augustine apparently said that as soon as you start counting you are already into heresy, so the Western Church tended to stress God’s Oneness, while the Eastern emphasised the three-ness.
“But God doesn’t exist!” protests today’s atheist. Eastern Fathers also said he didn’t. As we understand existence. God is a spirit, and the Eastern Orthodox way of Church is more spiritual, knowing as it does that God is not a thing, but that God contains every other thing, that matter is in spirit, not the other way around, and that self-knowledge, or Gnosis, is key to understanding. It reminds us how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are relations in process, not static names, just as life is not static, even beyond death.
It is said of our personal life that our own skeleton is completely replaced in a mere seven years, so we are clearly not static. How much more so the persons of the Trinity. Father Son and Holy Spirit are distinguished not by different hair colour and different likes and dislikes, but by relating differently to one another, dynamically, through Fatherhood beyond, Son-ship within, and Sanctification, or holiness, that is, wholeness, between.
And now for that odd clause I promised you. The Western church, in the eyes of the East, downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit, by adding, in 589, a new clause to the Creed. The Filioque clause, which literally means and the Son.
"We believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son." In Eastern Christian eyes, this is not true. The Spirit only proceeds from the Father. To the Orthodox, the Holy Spirit is more than Jesus’ Spirit, something charismatic churches may sympathise with. There is no hierarchy requiring Jesus. The Holy Spirit is abroad in the world.
In case this is all irrelevant, what matters is the transcendent, that matter is in spirit, not the other way around, so life is more than genes and psychological patterns. Christian life means we live together in interdependence within God beyond.
To experience and participate in the bliss of this divine life is to be able to see ourselves as relational processes within the more and ever more, to change, but to be aware of the change. To release our grasp, enabling the Spirit to be in the heights and the depths of life.
This is the challenge of the Trinity today, to release our autonomy, here and now, and for eternity. We cannot live until we die, and let mutual indwelling happen.
In a nutshell, our awareness is not ours, but we are in it. It is God.
So I invite you to become still. Feel your breath rise and fall, and ask yourself if you are making it happen.. or is God’s spirit actually breathing you. Feel the weight of your body... notice all the colours in your field of vision… and hold them in attention… Hear as many sounds as you can…. notice the silence from which they all rise and to which they all fall.. and rest alert, in presence.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore, Amen +
INTO A LIFE WITHOUT A SECURITY BLANKET
Sister Wendy Beckett, nun turned unlikely media star, was asked by a TV journalist how she would like to be remembered after her death. She paused, looked at him, & said: “I don’t want to be remembered.”
It reminded me of Jesus and the Sadducees, but before we go there, allow me to borrow a parable…
There was a man who invented the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a tribe in the north, where it was cold, bitterly cold. He taught people to make fire.
The people were very interested. He showed them the uses to which they could put their fire – not just to cook and keep themselves warm, but they could even see one another and see things they had previously just taken for granted. They were so grateful to learn this fire making.
But before they could express their gratitude, the man had disappeared. He wasn't concerned with getting their recognition or gratitude; only with their well-being. He pressed on to another tribe, where he again began to show them the value and the light of his invention.
People were interested there, too, a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their uncomfortable priests and politicians, who began to notice how the man was drawing crowds. They were losing their influence, so they decided to do away with the man, and crucified him. But they were afraid that the people might turn against them, so they were very wise, and even very wily.
Do you know what they did? They had a portrait of the man made, and mounted it on the main altar of the temple. The instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait, and the people were taught to revere the portrait and to pay reverence to the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did.
A book was written all about the man and a liturgy all about the book, and songs all about the liturgy. Veneration and worship to the fire making man went on for centuries after centuries, so that his name was remembered, but his fire was allowed to die out.
The moral - IF worship isn't leading to fire, if adoration isn't leading to love, if liturgy isn't leading to life, if this sermon isn’t leading to clarity & awareness, why?
IF you agree that it is not from lack of religion that the world is suffering, but from lack of love, lack of awareness, lack of freedom, then Jesus speaks in you.
IF you believe Jesus told disciples to watch and pray, to be alert, to judge not, to be the light in the word, to die to the self, to love the neighbour as the self and not to resist violence... Jesus presumably thought this was not only possible and preferable, but even realistic. How?
Psychologists today call these experiences intrinsic religion, bringing with them life in all its fullest, and not that religion which psychologists call extrinsic religion, bringing with it a social convention of guilt and anxiety.
I mention all this because the Sadducee religion was also a social convention, a keeping it all in the family, a maintaining of Israel’s corporate life, a using of laws, like the law to ensure effective biological reproduction.
Wanting to protect this everlasting tribal life, the Sadducees were suspicious of resurrection, Jesus’ fuller life.
They revered only the first five books of the OT, so to make Jesus look stupid, they confronted him with a joke based on the law from Deuteronomy 25, a law by which an unmarried but living brother of a recently dead but childless man would be required to marry his widow.
So in Luke 20, 27-38, the Sadducees challenge Jesus, rolling their eyes, mocking, implying a celestial orgy or a family feud, by saying: “Look Jesus, if a woman marries seven brothers who all die one by one still leaving her childless, whose is she in resurrection life?”
Quite like Sister Wendy Beckett with the TV journalist, Jesus just undercuts their basic premise. Resurrection, he says, doesn’t even mean continuity. In eternal life, since angels are undying and genderless, there is no marriage anyway, and so the old names and forms do not even apply. It is an entirely different order of life.
Jesus also brings up Moses, who the Sadducees revere, perceiving the living God saying through a bush: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” And, if you remember, Moses also seeks to know who God is, and perceives God say: “Tell the Israelites, I am sent you.”
Now, Jesus knows Abraham Isaac and Jacob have died, but he stresses that God is present, and therefore beyond time. He tells the Sadducees all live in God, the God of the living, the God who is I am. Jesus stresses the present as eternity elsewhere, as in John 8:58, when he says of himself: “truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” Time is in us, but in God, its all happening at once.
SO, resurrection is not only a past event for Christ and a future event for us, but a present event for both. It is being present, letting go and letting God, I am, watch and pray within you. Just as Jesus’ resurrection life caused the Sadducees to rethink the meaning of their own life, it can cause us to be more conscious, right here and now, so that our own awareness of I am can actually evolve.
I am not telling you, I am exploring this process with you. What is it? Firstly, I am can evolve through our body, whose job, with its worldly drives, is to keep going as long as possible. Then, I am can also evolve through our ego, that reactive sense of individuality, whose job is to identify with some part of the world, to grab it, and not to let it go at any cost, to be, as eucharist liturgy says, the I am who is unworthy to receive the Lord.
And then again, for some of us, I am can evolve even further, into the life of the soul, a subtler, finer, more conscious awareness, until, at last, I am evolves to a point, as it says in 1st Corinthians, when God will be all in all, all that is, a pure ’isness.
Finally then, I am can be, since sickness, age and death are all unavoidable, an I am who really is.
Christ Jesus, as we can clearly see by looking at the gospel reading, doesn’t regard this as automatic. He draws a distinction between those who are worthy of resurrection and those who are not. What does this mean? I think he means that this evolution of I am, as a potential inner growth, a process of creation knowing itself in creator, is a matter of potential, not one of fact.
It was expressed by 17th century Lutheran Christian turned Catholic Priest Angelus Silesius, who said of personal life: “The beast will become man, man will become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, will become God. Beast will become man, man will become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, will become God.”
If we die to our past, eternal life enters. If we try to preserve it, perhaps we are the dead burying their own dead, as Jesus said. Even today, there is a Christian version of the Sadducees’ religion, an everlasting life, not eternal life, a mere continuity grab, a security blanket for the guilty, a fear management system, which, if we are not quite careful, locks us into even more inner conflict and perpetuates a pre-human image of God, a controlling law giver from a necessarily fearful, terrible stage of human development – the trauma of self consciousness.
But God wants us to grow up. To continue the parental metaphor, no good Father wants a child to depend on him, but to become a good Father too.
Remember, Jesus in Luke 12:34: where your treasure is, there your heart will be. What you put your highest value onto is for all practical purposes what you become.
We have a choice. Either to be like British Victorian Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who said religion is a very good thing as long as it never interferes with your private life, OR to live the personal life so deeply that it expands into resurrection truths beyond itself.
To fear not, as angels always say, whenever they turn up in the Bible. Because Christians who do let religion interfere with their private lives have discovered love, not fear.
This is really important.
Many times, Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand, in fact it is within you, and you are the light of the world.
So, let’s draw some conclusions!
…If Jesus says you are the light of the world, and the author of the gospel of John says that in God, there is no darkness, then who are you?
In non-judgmental awareness, and by being alert, as Jesus says, by judging not, by repenting, which doesn’t mean grovelling but waking up, the beast can become man, man can become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, can become I am, the way the truth and the life.
God is close, which is why Jesus called God Abba, an intimate Aramaic word more like Daddy than a comfortably removed Father, a Monarch, or even worse, a Judge. Judge not, Jesus said, God’s consciousness can grow in us, as if smaller than the smallest mustard seed but growing larger than the largest plant, teaching us our enemy is a projection of our own fear, and our neighbour is an extension of our self.
Which is why Jesus parables often begin with a: "who of you doesn't know this already?" We really do, but it isn’t very comfortable to realise it, it is cosier to go back to sleep.
Recall the words of retiring Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I am not certain Christianity can flourish where people are comfortable. We need a modicum of suffering to realise what it means to belong to the Church.”
So we need to penetrate fear through constant awareness, in order to disarm and be resurrected. A BBC programme called the Big Silence has just ended, which has been showing five people as they are filmed entering monastic silence for the first time. One of them is scared of the silence, as we may be scared of God, but when he experiences the silence, it is a revelation to him that the fear of silence is actually in people, not in the silence.
To be resurrected we must die to self and evolve into God, even if the tradition is an obstacle. The theological construct that God would require the bloody sacrifice of Jesus so as to be able to forgive us our sins is as bizarre as it is repulsive. It is in the tradition, yes, but so is child sacrifice. Jesus lived for our sins.
Jesus ended our alienation and our separation. Jesus re-defined the world’s understanding of what it is to be human, and threatened vested interests. Jesus only died for our sins because he lived for them, and he still does live for them, in consciousness.
Despite the tradition, I don’t love Jesus Christ because I feel inadequate or guilty or fearful about the fire, or because I think you should. I am not even sure you should worship the fire-maker, and here is why.
Our truest nature, the open centre inside all our personalities, expresses everything else that is... the spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, the spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, the spiral fingerprints on our hands as we hold them, and the spiral DNA helix inside our suffering flesh. Philosopher Heraclitus and author of John’s gospel called this fire ‘Logos’, the wisdom of God. And we need to become, not merely worship, wisdom incarnate.
You are not a small wave in a great sea, you are a great sea knowing itself in a small wave.
You are not a human being having a spiritual experience, you are a spiritual being having human experiences.
In resurrection, if we get there, name and form does not matter so much. Maybe we only get there because it does not matter. Maybe we are only important because a loving intelligence called I am can know itself through us, we who are the latecomers in a very long process of physical evolution. Despite what happened to Gallileo, we now know that our planet is not at the centre of the world, it moves around one hot star among billions of stars, in a universe among possibly billions of universes.
We are not at the centre of things, and below the atomic level, they say, God seems to be more real than we are. So Jesus was a religious revolution because he came into a culture where holiness was up there and out there - separate - and he realised that a God who is over a chasm up a power pyramid, anywhere but here in fact, is no God at all.
TO CONCLUDE - Our 1st spiritual step is our belief, our interior conviction in a higher power, an other, not us, not another one of us, but an Other with a capital O. But belief is not enough.
If Jesus had had a parrot, he might have taught it to say: “Help, they’ve turned me into a parrot.” Jesus doesn’t want the parroting of belief, but a transformation into experience. It is in the gospels. “Not everyone who says to me: 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom.” (Matt 7:21).
SO THEN - our second spiritual step, is handing our life over to God, to be what we might not imagine we want to be, because prayer doesn’t change God, it dissolves the judge who is in us. We don’t merely believe in this Other with a capital O, we try to let God become us.
In the final step, the resurrection, which Sadducees didn’t believe in, there is no other… there is One.
In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen +
Not just a private hobby for nutters
I’ve heard some right nonsense preached from pulpits, and who am I to break with tradition? What better chance to uphold nonsense than a gospel passage in which Jesus tells us we must hate our fathers and mothers, our wives and children, our brothers and sisters, our life itself, and give up all our possessions. I could avoid it.
I could instead talk about how Stephen Hawking has been implying that physics can explain why we are all here, or tell you about latest protest group planning to surprise the Pope when he visits.
It would be a lot of fun if I did that, but it wouldn’t be nearly as controversial as just sticking to what Jesus is saying in Luke 14:25-33. If we wish to learn, he says, hate father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, our life, and give up all our possessions.
The notion of an established church may say that religion is a very public matter and not a private hobby for nutters, and this is a very, very good thing. But it should never, ever fool us into thinking that the gospel is just sanctified common sense. Jesus’ advice to hate your family and your life and your possessions really is anything but respectable, established, common sense, and it is as well that we know it isn’t.
If you’ve ever met a group of people on holiday for the first time, or overheard strangers meeting one another, you’ll know that we humans tend to talk about where we come from, what we do for a living, who our relatives are, what we own and know, and so on. It can be sometimes quite boring in the face of the mystery of life.
On holiday recently I closed my eyes rather than go through it with one person. And it was the Irish novelist George Bernard Shaw who was once at a polite English society dinner party when he was asked by a lady if he was enjoying himself. “It’s about the only thing I am enjoying here,” he replied.
Nevertheless, where we come from and who our relatives are and so on still has purpose. It establishes a social existence, a set of conventions so people feel they know one another.
Without this socially constructed sense of existence, there might be no you, and that just wouldn’t make sense would it?
For example, in a job interview I was once asked: “So, who are you then?” But it’s not a static fact. I could spent a whole lifetime finding out, and it is something like this is which is going on when Jesus tells us that if we wish to learn, we must hate father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, life and possessions.
Jesus knows that in his culture, filial relations are primary, and so people seem to have no existence at all without their ties to blood relatives, and especially to parents. He knows that without a family, frankly, who are you? But then he also knows that these roles are all so very temporary and contingent, a very mixed blessing, which can cause as much pain as they can pleasure.
So he is confronting what he knows will fade into insignificance compared with what he considers to be the only real relationship and claim on our human loyalty. What he is asking is this: Are you really no more than the product of social mirrors, or are you a child of God?
Jesus’ requirement for you to hate your family may of course be Semitic exaggeration, and the heightened language should not be pressed too literally. We know that Jesus cared for his mother at the foot of the cross. But we also know that his family thought he was going out of his mind. So the point is still the same.
Blood ties and personal property cannot and will not have the greatest claim on us. They will both disappear, and it is best to accept this now rather than later, or life can be hell. Building a watch-tower to protect your property or defend your city is pointless if they are both transient resources. As Jesus says in Mark 8:36, what will anyone gain by winning the world but losing their true self?
They say hold onto what you can in this life. Consciousness is an accidental by product of the brain, and beyond death there is oblivion and no awareness.
And maybe this is common sense, because it is a convention. But it is like saying that if you smash a television so that the images die, then the radio waves outside the house will also be destroyed.
If you wish to learn, Jesus says, relegate your claims on what has ultimate meaning for you. Hate your father and mother, your wife and child, your brother and sister, your life, and your possessions, which is to say, discipleship turns the world’s values upside down.
It takes a commitment. You have to chose between common sense and discipleship. As someone once said, it really is no measure of health at all to be very well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
And just think, said Fr Anthony De Mello, about someone who is afraid to let go of a nightmare, because that is the only world he knows. This is actually a picture of you, if you are not ready to see father, mother, and yes, your own life and possessions for what they are.
If you wish to attain lasting happiness, stop clinging to them, and whether you keep them or not, they lose their power to hurt you.
Spend some time seeing everything you cling to for what it really is. You cling and crave to them because they cause you some good feeling, some excitement and pleasure, but they also cause you worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, and fear.
Of course, you cannot renounce the world - it is here. But you can be happy without clinging to it. Your future and the world’s future depends on your response to the gospel, the good news that you are a child of God, not a child of the state, a child of biological ties, a child of social or commercial pressures, or social existence.
The Church may be respectable, but the gospel is anything but respectable common sense. After all, in common sense, they say, love is blind. But actually it is attachment which is blind. Love is very clear sighted, and if we wish to be disciples of Jesus, making the most of our gifts means risking them, not playing them safe.
Then we can experience that mysterious state which cannot be uttered or named, and begin to understand that if we loosen our grasp inwardly, we are repaid a hundred times over, by gaining eternal life. +
Transforming Suffering
Thich Nhat Hahn Room | Shift In Action
An interview with Basil Pennington, by Mary Nurrie Stearns
Basil Pennington is a Cisterian monk whose worldwide ministry focuses on bringing contemplative practices into the lives of spiritual seekers. He is a spiritual retreat leader, lecturer and author. He is most known for his work in the Centering Prayer movement, which is how I was introduced to his ministry. He resides at St. Joseph’s Monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts.
Upon the recommendation of a friend, I read his recent book, Lectio Divina, a description of the meditative practice of praying with the Christian scriptures. I came to understand more deeply how sacred texts can bring us to union with the divine and how contemplating inspired words can ease suffering. Realizing that he had a depth of understanding on suffering, its transformation, and the use of meditative practices in easing suffering, I arranged to interview him by telephone. His spiritual presence and depth of understanding were apparent during the interview and are present in the words that follow.
Personal Transformation: Let’s begin with the question: What is suffering?
Basil Pennington: First of all, it is important to distinguish between pain and suffering. As the Buddhists make very clear, suffering comes from wanting something and then not having it or feeling that you can’t have it. Pain causes suffering because we think we should not have it. We think we should be free from pain, that we should be filled with pleasure. Suffering is when something is going contrary to what we want. That is why some Buddhist schools say the way to get rid of suffering is to get rid of desire. We Christians believe that we are made for God. St. Augustine says, "Our hearts will not rest until they rest in you, O Lord." There is always going to be desire, but happiness can be found in knowing either we have what we want or we are on the way to getting it. We can want to participate in a certain amount of suffering and pain, and find a deep joy, because we have what we want. For example, when a little child suffers terribly, the mother and father want to be with that child. Even though it will cause them to suffer, they want to be with their child in that suffering
PT: If suffering comes from desire, and there is a difference between pain and suffering, do young children suffer or do they have pain?
Pennington: From a very early age, not to want to have pain is there. Pain is alien to us, so there is probably some suffering, but not the same kind of suffering we have later in life. There is suffering because we instinctively do not want pain. Only somebody more mature can see a value in pain or can transcend pain so that it does not cause them suffering.
Children suffer, but not as much as somebody older who has a reflective consciousness and suffers not only the immediate desire to be away from that pain but also suffers from the frustration of their desires.
PT: Let’s go back to the example of the parents wanting to be with the child when the child suffers. The parents want to suffer with their beloved.
Pennington: When you willingly enter into suffering, a lot of the suffering is relieved, even though suffering is very much there, because not wanting the suffering increases the suffering. When Christians speak of suffering we think of the crucified Lord and the tremendous sign of His Love for us. He said, "Greater love does no one have than He lay down his life for his friend." Jesus laid down his life in this graphic and dramatic way as a sign of His love, His concern for us. At one level, He suffered a great deal. Part of him did not want to go through that pain and suffering, and there was suffering because he took on all of our sins and stood before the Father in that sinful state. He suffered, but in the end He said, "Not my will but Thy will be done." Love conquered. The Beloved, His Father, wanted Him to go through this as a sign of love for us, and so He went through it. His love and concern kept overcoming his suffering. He was concerned about his executioners and forgave them, He was concerned about those being executed with him and promised them eternal life, He was concerned about His mother and saw that she was cared for. Even while He, at times, on the cross, prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?," He went on to triumph. In the end He gave a magnificent cry and had such a victory over suffering and death that the centurion said, "This must be the Son of God." Suffering can be very much there, but love constantly overcomes it when one embraces that suffering because she wants the fruit that that suffering can bring about.
PT: Love overcomes the suffering—whose love and the love of what?
Pennington: The persons suffering are less conscious of suffering because their concern is their love; they either want to suffer or are so concerned about something else that they don’t notice their suffering. The Buddhist idea is to get rid of all desire so you don’t notice the suffering. But love can be so great, going back to the parents who want to be with their child in the suffering, their love is so much with the child, that it would be more suffering for them not to be with the child in the suffering. The question is basically, "What do we want?" If we want to be free from all pain, if we want to be free from anything, and it is there, it begins to cause suffering.
PT: Buddhist precepts say it is our nature to suffer.
Pennington: Christians say suffering is an effect of sin. Because we are all sinners we all have suffering in our lives. Once we are able to completely overcome sin, we will no longer have suffering, or the effects of sin, which is in all our lives, because death itself is an effect of sin.
PT: How is death an effect of sin?
Pennington: The understanding of the Judeo Christian tradition is that God first created humans to live eternally, and because they rebelled against God in some way, part of the punishment was that in time they would die.
PT: For the sake of definition, what is sin?
Pennington: We understand sin as something that is contrary to the will of God, whether His will is expressed in explicit commandments, in the Revelation, or in the way God created things and meant them to function, what we call the Natural Law.
PT: Is there anyone who does not suffer?
Pennington: No, everyone has some suffering. Our Lord took on suffering voluntarily. The rest of us sinners suffer for our sins. We aim toward arriving at a state of complete union and communion with God. The result of that would be we would no longer suffer. In deep meditation we are completely free of suffering but we can’t abide in that beautiful state all the time.
PT: What is the best medicine for our suffering?
Pennington: In a way, suffering is a sickness and the best medicine for it is love, although love itself can cause suffering.
PT: Does love transform suffering, is suffering sloughed off?
Pennington: Suffering is caused by desire, so when we change our desires, what was originally suffering can become a sort of joy. When someone you love greatly suffers and you enter into their suffering, their suffering remains, but there is a deep joy in sharing suffering, and that solidarity may ease their suffering. In Christian thinking, we believe that Christ’s suffering is redemptive and, to the extent in which we can participate in Christ’s suffering, our suffering can become redemptive. In our love for our brothers and sisters we are happy to enter into redemptive suffering.
PT: What are the most prevalent ways that suffering is manifested in our individual lives?
Pennington: Many people equate pain with suffering. Because they are so desirous of being free from all pain, pain immediately causes suffering. In meditation you learn to move to another state of consciousness and you leave pain behind, so you gain a growing freedom from pain. In lovingly going out to others, you forget your own pains and sorrows because you are concerned with theirs. For instance, when you visit a retirement home, you find some people in absolute misery. They are taken up with the aches, pains, and limitations that age has brought upon them. They are miserable and they make everyone who comes near them miserable; nobody wants to be near them. Other people who have as much or more aches and pain are outgoing and loving. They are a joy and people like to be with them. Throughout their lives, they gradually schooled themselves, from meditation perhaps and through outgoing love, to leave their pain and suffering behind. For most people, suffering is experienced through pain or frustrations in love—being lonely, not having the persons they love with them, or not having anybody who is in communion love with them.
PT: I appreciate how you link suffering to desire, especially the desire to be free from pain. I thought suffering came more from a sense of separation from a spiritual self or from God.
Pennington: Separation from God is the essential suffering and we call it hell. Many people don’t know that much of the emptiness or longing desire that they suffer from is because they are not in touch with God or whatever name they give Him. Separation is a very real form of suffering in this life. Many, many people suffer because there is nobody in their life. They are not in touch with God, with the inner spirit. They are not in touch with their true selves, and they are not really in touch with anybody else.
PT: When we suffer, whether that suffering comes in the form of physical pain, loss of meaning, or alienation, what can we do?
Pennington: Of ourselves, in a certain sense, we can do nothing. The Lord says, "Without me you can do nothing." But, by the grace of God, and coming directly from Him, or through others who reach out to us, we can begin to open up to reality. The reality is that we are infinitely and tenderly held by the divine. We cease to exist if God does not bring us forth every moment in His creative love. We are united with everybody else in our human nature and in our sharing of a divine nature, so we are never really alone, we have all this union and communion. Getting in touch with that reality is the greatest healing. We can adopt meditative practices which enable us to begin that journey of finding our true inner selves or transcending our separate selves and leave behind some of the pain and suffering. Relief occurs only during the time of meditation until, through meditation and the grace of God, we come to experience the reality beyond our individual selves that then flows over into our lives.
PT: What practices transform suffering?
Pennington: Meditation practices are found in all the major traditions. In our Christian tradition are many forms of meditation. One that is growing in popularity, which goes back to ancient times, is today called "Centering Prayer" and originally called "Prayer in the Heart." It is a simple form of meditation where we turn to God, who is within, and rest with Him. He says, "Come to me you who are heavily burdened, I will refresh you." In this practice we leave everything else and rest with Him within, silently uttering one word of love, such as God, peace, Shalom, to quietly stay with Him. That’s a simple and ancient Christian form of meditation which is effective and fairly easy to practice.
The meditation practice of Lectio Divina is somewhat different. It is opening to the experience of God. One of the reasons we leave the words in Latin is because simply translated as "Divine Reading" conveys a false idea. I used to annoy my translators when lecturing in different languages around the world by quoting that old Latin phrase, "Traducta estraditor es," meaning that every translator is a traitor. If you translate a word, you leave so much behind and you pick up other meanings.
Lectio does not mean reading in the sense of printed symbols immediately conveying ideas to the intellect. Lectio is hearing a word—whether you see it on the page, pronounce it yourself, hear somebody else speak it, or recall it from your memory—hearing that word in the here and now being spoken by the one speaking it. In Lectio Divina, God himself is speaking. In the practice of Lectio Divina we read sacred texts which we believe have been inspired by God as a means of communicating with us. Lectio Divina is coming into communication with God and letting Him speak to us now, and reveal Himself to us now, through His inspired word. It is a type of transcendental meditation, at the same time it uses the rational mind to work with the words. In a meditation like Centering Prayer, you leave the rational mind and emotions behind, open yourself to rest in the Divine. St. Thomas Aquinas says, "Where the mind leaves off, the heart goes beyond."
PT: Lectio Divina is the practice of praying the scriptures…
Pennington: I am not comfortable with that expression, because praying is a word that has different meanings to people, but it could be a valid way of saying it if praying is understood the right way.
PT: How do we need to understand prayer?
Pennington: It is being with God in His inspired word, meeting God in His inspired word.
PT: I understand Lectio Divina as allowing the Word to take life in us, to move in us, so that it is a living experience of God in our hearts, not just an intellectual exercise.
Pennington: It is letting God be present to us in His spoken word. You could read my books and know a lot about me and my thoughts but you wouldn’t really know me. But if we have lunch together and visit for a while, you still hear my words but now it is a real experience of me and afterward, you know me.
PT: I am quoting from your book, "The simple little practice of each day meeting the Lord in His word and receiving from Him a word of life can indeed transform our lives." How does this practice transform our lives?
Pennington: The actual moment, the time of reception, is transformative in that God is present to us, speaking to us, reforming our minds and our hearts, and bringing us into His understanding. In order to remain as much as possible at that level, and there is only so much we can do, we take some particular word that He has given us at that Lectio session and we carry it with us. We come back to it as much as we can through the day. That word makes Him present with us but also invites us into His way of seeing things.
Maybe a concrete example would be helpful. Sometimes God seems very present, sometimes Lectio really speaks the word to you and you come alive with it. Other days, you listen and listen and it is just words you’ve heard before, and at the end of Lectio you have to choose a word on your own. One morning I was doing my Lectio and the Lord did not seem to turn up, so I chose the words, "I am the way." I let that word be with me when I was not tending to something else. A few hours later I was walking down the road from the monastery to the guest house, saying, "I am the way," and suddenly I realized, I am just not walking down a road, I am walking "in the way," the way to eternal life. Ever since then, when I walk down a street or a corridor, this comes back to me. I am, the whole of my life, is in the way. That word, at that moment, transformed my consciousness about walking through life. When I got to the guest house, a young fellow was waiting for me. The poor guy had about every problem in the book. I sat there listening to him, and I asked, "Lord, what am I gonna say to this fellow?" The Lord poked me in the ribs and I remembered. I told him about the Lord saying, "I am the way." As I shared that word with this fellow you could almost see the burdens falling off his shoulders. He now had a way to go. The word was a living word for him and it really changed his life. I remember, toward the end of that day, climbing the steps to the church. I was exhausted, and as I climbed up the steps, I said, "Lord, how I am going to get through Vespers? I will sing every note flat." Again, the Lord poked me, and I said, "Oh yes, You are the Way." I went up and sang Vespers and had a great time.
PT: If we look at Lectio Divina as a practice to transform suffering, the word for the day is something to hold onto, a word that guides us when we feel overwhelmed or lost.
Pennington: I am doing an anthology of Aelred and I read a passage this morning where Aelred said, "how sad it is for those who don’t know that they can go into the field of scriptures when they seek consolation." He uses the image of Isaiah who, after his mother died, went out to the field in sorrow and in the distance saw his beautiful bride coming. He said, "They can go out into the field of scriptures and lift up their eyes and the Lord will come to them, the beautiful bride will comfort them." In our time of suffering and sorrow we can find consolation and divine love in the scriptures, if we know to go there.
PT: This leads to my next question. I am again quoting your book. You say, "We need to separate ourselves from the enslavement of this world’s values. We have to be in the world, we cannot be of the world." How can we be in the world, but not of the world?
Pennington: It is taking the world in two different senses. We live in this world, this creation, but are not of this world, in the sense that we don’t accept the materialistic outlook and values. We are invited to see the world the way God sees it, as a wonderful evolving process which has been going on for millions of years. Evolution has reached a high level in us humans who can now, through Grace, be transformed to participate in the divine life. We are destined to pass beyond or transcend the materialistic world to enter into the divine level of being in life and love. The revelation of God through the scriptures reminds us, calls us to, and assures us of the help and the means we need to go beyond this material creation and enter fully into the divine reality.
PT: Talk about the four-stage process of lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio in Lectio Divina.
Pennington: In practice, sometimes we separate these phases, although more naturally this process takes place at the same time and in varying degrees, depending on what’s happening in the relationship at the moment. Lectio is primarily opening ourselves to let God speak to us, to be present to us in, through His inspired word. You can do Lectio with Nature too. God speaks to us through everything in Creation—the flowers, the wind, the beautiful child. You can do Lectio in a broad sense through everything, but His inspired word is the vehicle of His communication with us. He says: "I no longer call you servants but friends because I make known to you everything known to me." Lectio is meeting the Lord and letting Him speak to us and invite us into deeper relationship with Him, to realize our call and our destiny.
Meditatio, in the earlier Church tradition, is when we take and carry that word as a way of having the Lord as a presence, walking with us throughout the rest of the day, beginning in the session itself. This particular word speaks to us and we let it drill down into our hearts, into the powerful experience of the presence of God and the transforming call.
Oratio is translated as prayer. Here prayer means the complete response of giving oneself to God, trusting God, who has spoken to us through the Lectio. That word has become alive in Meditatio and our response is prayer, a trusting response to His word.
Contemplatio is when we rest together and nothing more needs to be said or even be thought of. It is being together with God. I learned contemplation when I was four years old, sitting with my grandparents on the porch. They sat there for hours saying nothing. I felt wonderful and I loved to sit with them. I realized later that they were with each other in love and that love embraced their little grandchild. I experienced the Contemplatio of love in that presence of my grandparents. So it’s coming just to sit with the Lord in that embrace of refreshing love. You can’t love what you don’t know, and Lectio is where you get to know that loving.
PT: We are talking about intimacy with God. What is your understanding of God?
Pennington: My understanding flows out of the Catholic expression of the Christian faith, of knowing that Jesus is God incarnate. God became man so that He can bring us into the fullness of the divine life. Jesus is the Son of the Father, and they have in them immense love, they embrace each other in Holy Spirit. I experience God as an immensely loving Father. I am very compassionate and sympathetic with women and others who have a problem with that name of Father, but it has been there for me for over sixty years. Also, I was blessed with a very special father, so it makes it easier for me to use Father. I look to Jesus in the gospel to help me understand this tremendously loving Father. As a monk of the Cisterian tradition, I have been fed by St. Bernard of Clairveau, who spent the last eighteen years of his life commenting on the Song of Songs, the beautiful love song in the Hebrew Bible. Their God is very much the lover, and I have grown to enter into that experience with God as an immense mother, an all-embracing love and creative energy. To enter totally and be completely embraced by divine love has all the richness of the very best experience and understanding we can have of personal love, and yet is so much more. Trying to talk about my concept of God is complex and difficult because it is so rich, and yet in experience it is absolutely simple, it is simply a communion in a totally satisfying love.
PT: I am quoting you, "Herein is the true purpose of our practice, to free ourselves from the empirious domination of our own thoughts, passions and desires, to free the spirit for the things of the Spirit." What are the things of the Spirit? I ask this because I see a relationship to things of the Spirit and the reduction of suffering.
Pennington: The first and most fundamental one is reality. The virtue of humility means acceptance of reality. If we are not in reality, then we can’t possibly be in the things of the spirit. The reality is that God is good, all loving and that his creation is good. What immediately follows upon the perception of reality is beauty and goodness, and what follows that is love. We love this immense beauty and we love most of all the author of this goodness and beauty, God himself. These are things of the spirit. It is astounding when we start to reflect that God, the source of all goodness, all truth, all beauty, all life, all love, did, in His enormous love, enter into our struggling evolving human reality and accept our suffering. Suffering is a thing of the spirit, too, for that reason. It has been made a vehicle of love and everything can become something of the spirit when it is informed by love.
PT: We have talked about suffering, particularly as we experience and relate to it in our personal lives. Let’s shift to social issues. First, I would like you to talk about suffering in a social context. Then I would like your comments on the war in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Can we have any impact on suffering in Kosovo and Yugoslavia?
Pennington: We all suffer because of our parents. One element of maturing is realizing that our parents were poor stupid sinners like we are. Even if they did their best, they failed in ways. However, we can never thank them enough because they have given us, with God, the gift of life and being. Along with that comes struggling. If that happens in the individual, it also happens in the social level. The failures of many, or the limitations of many, build up and become our inheritance. Kosovo is an example of that. The suffering in the Balkans, except for the short time that Tito held it in an iron grip, goes back centuries to the time when Islam invaded and conquered parts of the area, leaving this heritage of strife. The willingness to live together and share was never engendered, which is what we have to learn to do everywhere in the world today. They are not the only ones who did that. We did it to the Native Americans, the Scotch Presbyterians did it to the Irish Catholics in North Ireland, and the Jews have done it to the Palestinians in the Holy Land. We can find instances of it all over history.
When you take away people’s land, when there is not a willingness to live and work together in some way, inevitably there begins to be a minority group and that minority suffers, like the Native Americans in the United States. At some point that minority revolts or seeks violent means, after decades of non-violent means not getting them anywhere. Sometimes just a few turn to violence, but it involves all the others. Then there is the problem of what the oppressive majority does in the face of that violence. They usually react with even more violence. These days the human community steps in to try to relieve that situation, often making it worse before it makes it better.
It is out of the complex heritage of our poor sinful struggling human family that these situations arise. Sometimes media makes us intensely aware of things going on and sometimes it doesn’t. There is less awareness of what is going on in Afghanistan and East Africa. When we hear about violent oppression we are confronted as fellow humans. Those of us who are Christians should be conscious of how Christ suffered and died for every human person. Therefore, these people are precious to Christ and they are precious to us.
PT: Then comes the question, what can I do about it?
Pennington: We believe in the power of prayer. God and Christ have told us that our prayer is effective. "Ask and you shall receive." God, who constantly brings this creation forward in his creative love, is affected by what we ask and seek of Him. Prayer is important because of the deep intersolidarity of the human family and the whole cosmos. Creating deeper peace in ourselves creates a level of peace for the whole human family. By giving up violence in our own attitudes, feelings and spirit, and seeking peace, we can become an instrument of peace. We are just one among billions and that may seem little, but sometimes we have to be content with doing the very little that we can. There is always political action. We have to discern, in each case, the appropriate political action we need to take. Certainly we should try to move our own government toward a less violent attitude. It is extremely difficult, when the situation is occurring, to say what we can immediately do, apart from prayer to try to bring peace. We can do whatever is possible to provide relief for the people suffering. This kind of suffering brings us into strong and painful contact with our limitations.
PT: Is there anything that you want to add about suffering?
Pennington: It is extremely important to have hope. The evolution of human consciousness has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, and is a powerful movement. Divine Creative Energies, which are pure love, are at the base of this movement. Humanity, in its evolutionary course, has gone through terrible periods, yet has moved on and on. We are at a fairly high level of human consciousness in the rational period we live in. More and more people realize that we have to move to a more integrated level. One of the enormous challenges lying ahead of us is the full equality of men and women and the full integration of the masculine and feminine dimensions of our being. This will make an enormous difference in the way the human family lives and functions. Hopefully, we will be much more peaceful. That integration is a coming together as a human family, a human community. We are most empowered and find the greatest possible security and the fullest happiness in community when we embrace each other as brothers and sisters, as children of the Father.
Each of us needs to live the hope, realizing that we are in this wonderful evolving course. Even if there is suffering and struggle in the course of it, the grain of wheat that falls on the ground comes forth with a hundred grains; it is in process.
An interview with Basil Pennington, by Mary Nurrie Stearns
Basil Pennington is a Cisterian monk whose worldwide ministry focuses on bringing contemplative practices into the lives of spiritual seekers. He is a spiritual retreat leader, lecturer and author. He is most known for his work in the Centering Prayer movement, which is how I was introduced to his ministry. He resides at St. Joseph’s Monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts.
Upon the recommendation of a friend, I read his recent book, Lectio Divina, a description of the meditative practice of praying with the Christian scriptures. I came to understand more deeply how sacred texts can bring us to union with the divine and how contemplating inspired words can ease suffering. Realizing that he had a depth of understanding on suffering, its transformation, and the use of meditative practices in easing suffering, I arranged to interview him by telephone. His spiritual presence and depth of understanding were apparent during the interview and are present in the words that follow.
Personal Transformation: Let’s begin with the question: What is suffering?
Basil Pennington: First of all, it is important to distinguish between pain and suffering. As the Buddhists make very clear, suffering comes from wanting something and then not having it or feeling that you can’t have it. Pain causes suffering because we think we should not have it. We think we should be free from pain, that we should be filled with pleasure. Suffering is when something is going contrary to what we want. That is why some Buddhist schools say the way to get rid of suffering is to get rid of desire. We Christians believe that we are made for God. St. Augustine says, "Our hearts will not rest until they rest in you, O Lord." There is always going to be desire, but happiness can be found in knowing either we have what we want or we are on the way to getting it. We can want to participate in a certain amount of suffering and pain, and find a deep joy, because we have what we want. For example, when a little child suffers terribly, the mother and father want to be with that child. Even though it will cause them to suffer, they want to be with their child in that suffering
PT: If suffering comes from desire, and there is a difference between pain and suffering, do young children suffer or do they have pain?
Pennington: From a very early age, not to want to have pain is there. Pain is alien to us, so there is probably some suffering, but not the same kind of suffering we have later in life. There is suffering because we instinctively do not want pain. Only somebody more mature can see a value in pain or can transcend pain so that it does not cause them suffering.
Children suffer, but not as much as somebody older who has a reflective consciousness and suffers not only the immediate desire to be away from that pain but also suffers from the frustration of their desires.
PT: Let’s go back to the example of the parents wanting to be with the child when the child suffers. The parents want to suffer with their beloved.
Pennington: When you willingly enter into suffering, a lot of the suffering is relieved, even though suffering is very much there, because not wanting the suffering increases the suffering. When Christians speak of suffering we think of the crucified Lord and the tremendous sign of His Love for us. He said, "Greater love does no one have than He lay down his life for his friend." Jesus laid down his life in this graphic and dramatic way as a sign of His love, His concern for us. At one level, He suffered a great deal. Part of him did not want to go through that pain and suffering, and there was suffering because he took on all of our sins and stood before the Father in that sinful state. He suffered, but in the end He said, "Not my will but Thy will be done." Love conquered. The Beloved, His Father, wanted Him to go through this as a sign of love for us, and so He went through it. His love and concern kept overcoming his suffering. He was concerned about his executioners and forgave them, He was concerned about those being executed with him and promised them eternal life, He was concerned about His mother and saw that she was cared for. Even while He, at times, on the cross, prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?," He went on to triumph. In the end He gave a magnificent cry and had such a victory over suffering and death that the centurion said, "This must be the Son of God." Suffering can be very much there, but love constantly overcomes it when one embraces that suffering because she wants the fruit that that suffering can bring about.
PT: Love overcomes the suffering—whose love and the love of what?
Pennington: The persons suffering are less conscious of suffering because their concern is their love; they either want to suffer or are so concerned about something else that they don’t notice their suffering. The Buddhist idea is to get rid of all desire so you don’t notice the suffering. But love can be so great, going back to the parents who want to be with their child in the suffering, their love is so much with the child, that it would be more suffering for them not to be with the child in the suffering. The question is basically, "What do we want?" If we want to be free from all pain, if we want to be free from anything, and it is there, it begins to cause suffering.
PT: Buddhist precepts say it is our nature to suffer.
Pennington: Christians say suffering is an effect of sin. Because we are all sinners we all have suffering in our lives. Once we are able to completely overcome sin, we will no longer have suffering, or the effects of sin, which is in all our lives, because death itself is an effect of sin.
PT: How is death an effect of sin?
Pennington: The understanding of the Judeo Christian tradition is that God first created humans to live eternally, and because they rebelled against God in some way, part of the punishment was that in time they would die.
PT: For the sake of definition, what is sin?
Pennington: We understand sin as something that is contrary to the will of God, whether His will is expressed in explicit commandments, in the Revelation, or in the way God created things and meant them to function, what we call the Natural Law.
PT: Is there anyone who does not suffer?
Pennington: No, everyone has some suffering. Our Lord took on suffering voluntarily. The rest of us sinners suffer for our sins. We aim toward arriving at a state of complete union and communion with God. The result of that would be we would no longer suffer. In deep meditation we are completely free of suffering but we can’t abide in that beautiful state all the time.
PT: What is the best medicine for our suffering?
Pennington: In a way, suffering is a sickness and the best medicine for it is love, although love itself can cause suffering.
PT: Does love transform suffering, is suffering sloughed off?
Pennington: Suffering is caused by desire, so when we change our desires, what was originally suffering can become a sort of joy. When someone you love greatly suffers and you enter into their suffering, their suffering remains, but there is a deep joy in sharing suffering, and that solidarity may ease their suffering. In Christian thinking, we believe that Christ’s suffering is redemptive and, to the extent in which we can participate in Christ’s suffering, our suffering can become redemptive. In our love for our brothers and sisters we are happy to enter into redemptive suffering.
PT: What are the most prevalent ways that suffering is manifested in our individual lives?
Pennington: Many people equate pain with suffering. Because they are so desirous of being free from all pain, pain immediately causes suffering. In meditation you learn to move to another state of consciousness and you leave pain behind, so you gain a growing freedom from pain. In lovingly going out to others, you forget your own pains and sorrows because you are concerned with theirs. For instance, when you visit a retirement home, you find some people in absolute misery. They are taken up with the aches, pains, and limitations that age has brought upon them. They are miserable and they make everyone who comes near them miserable; nobody wants to be near them. Other people who have as much or more aches and pain are outgoing and loving. They are a joy and people like to be with them. Throughout their lives, they gradually schooled themselves, from meditation perhaps and through outgoing love, to leave their pain and suffering behind. For most people, suffering is experienced through pain or frustrations in love—being lonely, not having the persons they love with them, or not having anybody who is in communion love with them.
PT: I appreciate how you link suffering to desire, especially the desire to be free from pain. I thought suffering came more from a sense of separation from a spiritual self or from God.
Pennington: Separation from God is the essential suffering and we call it hell. Many people don’t know that much of the emptiness or longing desire that they suffer from is because they are not in touch with God or whatever name they give Him. Separation is a very real form of suffering in this life. Many, many people suffer because there is nobody in their life. They are not in touch with God, with the inner spirit. They are not in touch with their true selves, and they are not really in touch with anybody else.
PT: When we suffer, whether that suffering comes in the form of physical pain, loss of meaning, or alienation, what can we do?
Pennington: Of ourselves, in a certain sense, we can do nothing. The Lord says, "Without me you can do nothing." But, by the grace of God, and coming directly from Him, or through others who reach out to us, we can begin to open up to reality. The reality is that we are infinitely and tenderly held by the divine. We cease to exist if God does not bring us forth every moment in His creative love. We are united with everybody else in our human nature and in our sharing of a divine nature, so we are never really alone, we have all this union and communion. Getting in touch with that reality is the greatest healing. We can adopt meditative practices which enable us to begin that journey of finding our true inner selves or transcending our separate selves and leave behind some of the pain and suffering. Relief occurs only during the time of meditation until, through meditation and the grace of God, we come to experience the reality beyond our individual selves that then flows over into our lives.
PT: What practices transform suffering?
Pennington: Meditation practices are found in all the major traditions. In our Christian tradition are many forms of meditation. One that is growing in popularity, which goes back to ancient times, is today called "Centering Prayer" and originally called "Prayer in the Heart." It is a simple form of meditation where we turn to God, who is within, and rest with Him. He says, "Come to me you who are heavily burdened, I will refresh you." In this practice we leave everything else and rest with Him within, silently uttering one word of love, such as God, peace, Shalom, to quietly stay with Him. That’s a simple and ancient Christian form of meditation which is effective and fairly easy to practice.
The meditation practice of Lectio Divina is somewhat different. It is opening to the experience of God. One of the reasons we leave the words in Latin is because simply translated as "Divine Reading" conveys a false idea. I used to annoy my translators when lecturing in different languages around the world by quoting that old Latin phrase, "Traducta estraditor es," meaning that every translator is a traitor. If you translate a word, you leave so much behind and you pick up other meanings.
Lectio does not mean reading in the sense of printed symbols immediately conveying ideas to the intellect. Lectio is hearing a word—whether you see it on the page, pronounce it yourself, hear somebody else speak it, or recall it from your memory—hearing that word in the here and now being spoken by the one speaking it. In Lectio Divina, God himself is speaking. In the practice of Lectio Divina we read sacred texts which we believe have been inspired by God as a means of communicating with us. Lectio Divina is coming into communication with God and letting Him speak to us now, and reveal Himself to us now, through His inspired word. It is a type of transcendental meditation, at the same time it uses the rational mind to work with the words. In a meditation like Centering Prayer, you leave the rational mind and emotions behind, open yourself to rest in the Divine. St. Thomas Aquinas says, "Where the mind leaves off, the heart goes beyond."
PT: Lectio Divina is the practice of praying the scriptures…
Pennington: I am not comfortable with that expression, because praying is a word that has different meanings to people, but it could be a valid way of saying it if praying is understood the right way.
PT: How do we need to understand prayer?
Pennington: It is being with God in His inspired word, meeting God in His inspired word.
PT: I understand Lectio Divina as allowing the Word to take life in us, to move in us, so that it is a living experience of God in our hearts, not just an intellectual exercise.
Pennington: It is letting God be present to us in His spoken word. You could read my books and know a lot about me and my thoughts but you wouldn’t really know me. But if we have lunch together and visit for a while, you still hear my words but now it is a real experience of me and afterward, you know me.
PT: I am quoting from your book, "The simple little practice of each day meeting the Lord in His word and receiving from Him a word of life can indeed transform our lives." How does this practice transform our lives?
Pennington: The actual moment, the time of reception, is transformative in that God is present to us, speaking to us, reforming our minds and our hearts, and bringing us into His understanding. In order to remain as much as possible at that level, and there is only so much we can do, we take some particular word that He has given us at that Lectio session and we carry it with us. We come back to it as much as we can through the day. That word makes Him present with us but also invites us into His way of seeing things.
Maybe a concrete example would be helpful. Sometimes God seems very present, sometimes Lectio really speaks the word to you and you come alive with it. Other days, you listen and listen and it is just words you’ve heard before, and at the end of Lectio you have to choose a word on your own. One morning I was doing my Lectio and the Lord did not seem to turn up, so I chose the words, "I am the way." I let that word be with me when I was not tending to something else. A few hours later I was walking down the road from the monastery to the guest house, saying, "I am the way," and suddenly I realized, I am just not walking down a road, I am walking "in the way," the way to eternal life. Ever since then, when I walk down a street or a corridor, this comes back to me. I am, the whole of my life, is in the way. That word, at that moment, transformed my consciousness about walking through life. When I got to the guest house, a young fellow was waiting for me. The poor guy had about every problem in the book. I sat there listening to him, and I asked, "Lord, what am I gonna say to this fellow?" The Lord poked me in the ribs and I remembered. I told him about the Lord saying, "I am the way." As I shared that word with this fellow you could almost see the burdens falling off his shoulders. He now had a way to go. The word was a living word for him and it really changed his life. I remember, toward the end of that day, climbing the steps to the church. I was exhausted, and as I climbed up the steps, I said, "Lord, how I am going to get through Vespers? I will sing every note flat." Again, the Lord poked me, and I said, "Oh yes, You are the Way." I went up and sang Vespers and had a great time.
PT: If we look at Lectio Divina as a practice to transform suffering, the word for the day is something to hold onto, a word that guides us when we feel overwhelmed or lost.
Pennington: I am doing an anthology of Aelred and I read a passage this morning where Aelred said, "how sad it is for those who don’t know that they can go into the field of scriptures when they seek consolation." He uses the image of Isaiah who, after his mother died, went out to the field in sorrow and in the distance saw his beautiful bride coming. He said, "They can go out into the field of scriptures and lift up their eyes and the Lord will come to them, the beautiful bride will comfort them." In our time of suffering and sorrow we can find consolation and divine love in the scriptures, if we know to go there.
PT: This leads to my next question. I am again quoting your book. You say, "We need to separate ourselves from the enslavement of this world’s values. We have to be in the world, we cannot be of the world." How can we be in the world, but not of the world?
Pennington: It is taking the world in two different senses. We live in this world, this creation, but are not of this world, in the sense that we don’t accept the materialistic outlook and values. We are invited to see the world the way God sees it, as a wonderful evolving process which has been going on for millions of years. Evolution has reached a high level in us humans who can now, through Grace, be transformed to participate in the divine life. We are destined to pass beyond or transcend the materialistic world to enter into the divine level of being in life and love. The revelation of God through the scriptures reminds us, calls us to, and assures us of the help and the means we need to go beyond this material creation and enter fully into the divine reality.
PT: Talk about the four-stage process of lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio in Lectio Divina.
Pennington: In practice, sometimes we separate these phases, although more naturally this process takes place at the same time and in varying degrees, depending on what’s happening in the relationship at the moment. Lectio is primarily opening ourselves to let God speak to us, to be present to us in, through His inspired word. You can do Lectio with Nature too. God speaks to us through everything in Creation—the flowers, the wind, the beautiful child. You can do Lectio in a broad sense through everything, but His inspired word is the vehicle of His communication with us. He says: "I no longer call you servants but friends because I make known to you everything known to me." Lectio is meeting the Lord and letting Him speak to us and invite us into deeper relationship with Him, to realize our call and our destiny.
Meditatio, in the earlier Church tradition, is when we take and carry that word as a way of having the Lord as a presence, walking with us throughout the rest of the day, beginning in the session itself. This particular word speaks to us and we let it drill down into our hearts, into the powerful experience of the presence of God and the transforming call.
Oratio is translated as prayer. Here prayer means the complete response of giving oneself to God, trusting God, who has spoken to us through the Lectio. That word has become alive in Meditatio and our response is prayer, a trusting response to His word.
Contemplatio is when we rest together and nothing more needs to be said or even be thought of. It is being together with God. I learned contemplation when I was four years old, sitting with my grandparents on the porch. They sat there for hours saying nothing. I felt wonderful and I loved to sit with them. I realized later that they were with each other in love and that love embraced their little grandchild. I experienced the Contemplatio of love in that presence of my grandparents. So it’s coming just to sit with the Lord in that embrace of refreshing love. You can’t love what you don’t know, and Lectio is where you get to know that loving.
PT: We are talking about intimacy with God. What is your understanding of God?
Pennington: My understanding flows out of the Catholic expression of the Christian faith, of knowing that Jesus is God incarnate. God became man so that He can bring us into the fullness of the divine life. Jesus is the Son of the Father, and they have in them immense love, they embrace each other in Holy Spirit. I experience God as an immensely loving Father. I am very compassionate and sympathetic with women and others who have a problem with that name of Father, but it has been there for me for over sixty years. Also, I was blessed with a very special father, so it makes it easier for me to use Father. I look to Jesus in the gospel to help me understand this tremendously loving Father. As a monk of the Cisterian tradition, I have been fed by St. Bernard of Clairveau, who spent the last eighteen years of his life commenting on the Song of Songs, the beautiful love song in the Hebrew Bible. Their God is very much the lover, and I have grown to enter into that experience with God as an immense mother, an all-embracing love and creative energy. To enter totally and be completely embraced by divine love has all the richness of the very best experience and understanding we can have of personal love, and yet is so much more. Trying to talk about my concept of God is complex and difficult because it is so rich, and yet in experience it is absolutely simple, it is simply a communion in a totally satisfying love.
PT: I am quoting you, "Herein is the true purpose of our practice, to free ourselves from the empirious domination of our own thoughts, passions and desires, to free the spirit for the things of the Spirit." What are the things of the Spirit? I ask this because I see a relationship to things of the Spirit and the reduction of suffering.
Pennington: The first and most fundamental one is reality. The virtue of humility means acceptance of reality. If we are not in reality, then we can’t possibly be in the things of the spirit. The reality is that God is good, all loving and that his creation is good. What immediately follows upon the perception of reality is beauty and goodness, and what follows that is love. We love this immense beauty and we love most of all the author of this goodness and beauty, God himself. These are things of the spirit. It is astounding when we start to reflect that God, the source of all goodness, all truth, all beauty, all life, all love, did, in His enormous love, enter into our struggling evolving human reality and accept our suffering. Suffering is a thing of the spirit, too, for that reason. It has been made a vehicle of love and everything can become something of the spirit when it is informed by love.
PT: We have talked about suffering, particularly as we experience and relate to it in our personal lives. Let’s shift to social issues. First, I would like you to talk about suffering in a social context. Then I would like your comments on the war in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Can we have any impact on suffering in Kosovo and Yugoslavia?
Pennington: We all suffer because of our parents. One element of maturing is realizing that our parents were poor stupid sinners like we are. Even if they did their best, they failed in ways. However, we can never thank them enough because they have given us, with God, the gift of life and being. Along with that comes struggling. If that happens in the individual, it also happens in the social level. The failures of many, or the limitations of many, build up and become our inheritance. Kosovo is an example of that. The suffering in the Balkans, except for the short time that Tito held it in an iron grip, goes back centuries to the time when Islam invaded and conquered parts of the area, leaving this heritage of strife. The willingness to live together and share was never engendered, which is what we have to learn to do everywhere in the world today. They are not the only ones who did that. We did it to the Native Americans, the Scotch Presbyterians did it to the Irish Catholics in North Ireland, and the Jews have done it to the Palestinians in the Holy Land. We can find instances of it all over history.
When you take away people’s land, when there is not a willingness to live and work together in some way, inevitably there begins to be a minority group and that minority suffers, like the Native Americans in the United States. At some point that minority revolts or seeks violent means, after decades of non-violent means not getting them anywhere. Sometimes just a few turn to violence, but it involves all the others. Then there is the problem of what the oppressive majority does in the face of that violence. They usually react with even more violence. These days the human community steps in to try to relieve that situation, often making it worse before it makes it better.
It is out of the complex heritage of our poor sinful struggling human family that these situations arise. Sometimes media makes us intensely aware of things going on and sometimes it doesn’t. There is less awareness of what is going on in Afghanistan and East Africa. When we hear about violent oppression we are confronted as fellow humans. Those of us who are Christians should be conscious of how Christ suffered and died for every human person. Therefore, these people are precious to Christ and they are precious to us.
PT: Then comes the question, what can I do about it?
Pennington: We believe in the power of prayer. God and Christ have told us that our prayer is effective. "Ask and you shall receive." God, who constantly brings this creation forward in his creative love, is affected by what we ask and seek of Him. Prayer is important because of the deep intersolidarity of the human family and the whole cosmos. Creating deeper peace in ourselves creates a level of peace for the whole human family. By giving up violence in our own attitudes, feelings and spirit, and seeking peace, we can become an instrument of peace. We are just one among billions and that may seem little, but sometimes we have to be content with doing the very little that we can. There is always political action. We have to discern, in each case, the appropriate political action we need to take. Certainly we should try to move our own government toward a less violent attitude. It is extremely difficult, when the situation is occurring, to say what we can immediately do, apart from prayer to try to bring peace. We can do whatever is possible to provide relief for the people suffering. This kind of suffering brings us into strong and painful contact with our limitations.
PT: Is there anything that you want to add about suffering?
Pennington: It is extremely important to have hope. The evolution of human consciousness has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, and is a powerful movement. Divine Creative Energies, which are pure love, are at the base of this movement. Humanity, in its evolutionary course, has gone through terrible periods, yet has moved on and on. We are at a fairly high level of human consciousness in the rational period we live in. More and more people realize that we have to move to a more integrated level. One of the enormous challenges lying ahead of us is the full equality of men and women and the full integration of the masculine and feminine dimensions of our being. This will make an enormous difference in the way the human family lives and functions. Hopefully, we will be much more peaceful. That integration is a coming together as a human family, a human community. We are most empowered and find the greatest possible security and the fullest happiness in community when we embrace each other as brothers and sisters, as children of the Father.
Each of us needs to live the hope, realizing that we are in this wonderful evolving course. Even if there is suffering and struggle in the course of it, the grain of wheat that falls on the ground comes forth with a hundred grains; it is in process.
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